Part 5: From Terminal Cells to Sprite Maps: Font Fallbacks and Auto-Tiling

Building a terminal-based engine in pure ASCII looks cool for about five minutes. Then you try rendering a complex facility map with corners, T-junctions, and status icons, and raw character cells start feeling incredibly limiting. Two specific problems hit me immediately when I tried switching to Raylib for graphics. First, drawing wall tiles manually by hand in level files meant placing 16…