Floor Tile Study
The short story here goes as the following; starting with a plane, I adjusted the edges to be the shapes of the stones. From there is I extruded those polygons up, beveled the edges and smoothed it all to get the nice stone shapes. I started the texture at this point by painting cracks and some rough stone shapes. Next applying color, textured and some highlights to accentuate each stone.
This pattern of stones was tile tested many times before I went with what is shown. When creating uneven scale stonework, previewing them tiled is important all throughout the process to reduce noticeably repeatable stone sizes. The same was applied to adding the cracks in the next step. While they should be unique enough to look good, they shouldn't be so obvious from one tile to the next. The highlights added to the edges also reduces the overall contrast of space between the stones. This is done with commonly used floor patterns to reduce conflicting with action on the screen. For example, if the floor of a game matches color, contrast levels or generally distracts from the characters it's not good for gameplay.
To express a few points, I randomly Googled up a stone texture to create a floor pattern that I'll create a floor tile from.
From the original image, I simply cropped out a section, adjusting the scale of a couple bricks to fit into a square, 256x256 texture. Technically, I now have a tiling floor texture, but upon preview we can see a lot of problems with this. The main problems are the unique cracked lines in the top three stones and the left-to-right lighting difference (mostly in the bottom stone).
 
Using the clone stamp at a lower opacity, I reduced the strength of the major cracks and some of the little dark spots here and there. For this example, it was fastest to dodge the dark lighting off of the left side of the tile. This improves the tiling a lot, but there's still a couple thing that can be done to improve this.
 
Lighting being too bright or too dark can kill a texture. While this absolutely depends on the engine and art style you're working with if a material already has pure black or white in it, there is no place lighting can take it (if it's already dark it can't get darker). Retaining your material withing specific levels is game art 101 yet many artists have little knowledge of this. The expanded view of the histogram window in photoshop can give more details on this, but if it's not outlined in your project's style guide, you may be missing an important technical step.
 
With that in mind, I lightened the dark lines between the stones and gave them stronger edge highlights. This example still isn't perfect, and I wouldn't use this result since I generally prefer to paint or sculpt everything from the start. Nevertheless, it's acquitted for describe a few techniques.
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