Creating 2D Angled Top Down Terrain Instead of Fully Flat

Question

Similar to the game Factorio im trying to create "3D" terrain but of course in 2D Factorio seems to do this very well, creating terrain that looks like this

Where you can see edges of terrain and its very clearly curved. In my own 2D game Ive been trying to think of how to do the same thing, but all the ways I can think of seem to be slow or CPU intensive. Currently my terrain looks like this:

Simply 2D quads textured and drawn on screen, each quad is 16x16 (except the water thats technically a background but its not important now), How could I even begin to change my terrain to look more like a Factorio or other "2.5D" games, do they simply use different textures and check where the tile would be relative to other tiles? Or do they take a different approach?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

The example you provided are still 2D textures (technically). But since the textures themselves are 'fancy 3D', they appear to be 3D/2D angled.

So your best bet would be to upgrade your textures. (and add shadow to entities for extra depth).

Edit:

The edges you asked about are probably layed-out by checking if a 'tile' is an edge, and if so it adds an edge-texture on top the background. While the actual tile itself is also a flat image (just like the water). Add some shadow afterwards and the 3D illusion is complete.

I hope this answers your question, otherwise feel free to ask clarification.