I have been messing around with lighting, specular maps, and bump maps lately, seeing how things look.
For instance, here the ground has a bump map (makes a 2d texture look like it has depth) and a specular map (makes parts of it shiny! Yay shinys!) applied to it, which makes it pop out a bit.
This shot (click for full size) shows the above ground texture combined with very (very) rough lighting set up, rest assured I would not have such harsh lighting in the actual game, but I would love to have some neat lighting effects, especially around torches.
Incidentally, if you are familiar with Java programming and wanted to help out, knowing how to implement shaders would be a great skill with which to get you on board... wink wink... please?