True, I thought of that after I made the comment... In terms of mechanics, I am going to be pushing in a lot of different directions from the original. My bad.
I do, however, want to maintain the console/terminal aesthetic, as the style goes well with the theme I'll be working with, which isn't yet apparent to those watching the project because I haven't announced exactly what my final goal will be in this regard. It'll star to become more apparent around 0.2~0.3-ish.
I can also give a much better reason for the limitation: The entire engine is designed around the console terminal concept, whereby you have a character of a certain color over a cell of a certain background color. Why would I do this? I can animate hundreds of thousands of particles and cool effects very quickly, and do it all without the GPU. The spritesheet implementation means it's quite easy to add sprites instead of letters, but changing it to use a multi-color sprites turns it into a basic tiling engine, which loses the speed advantage and is no longer compatible with the particle layering which is going on in the background.
