You are right about a few things, though the key is that Raylib is what's creating the polygon (after I parse the text file into a sequence) and ideally I don't handle face/mesh creation myself (at low-level). Maybe eventually.

what you mean by color index face hints

For additional context on where faces are.

I've mentioned vertex color (ideal as face colors), but I probably do want to handle a 3-digit-hex color palette with object-library-wide management.

#values: matrix_xres matrix_yres target_size vert_num
#IDEA, fails with heart as there is only 1 corner vertex
32
32
160.0
11
                                
               E                
               1                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
E2         C       C         3E 
                                
                                
               1                
              2@3               
              4 5               
         C           C          
                                
                                
                                
               C                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
                                
     4                    5     
    E                      E    
                                

The reason I'm thinking about this is that it would be better to have one way to define verts. triangle_strip can generally do more (shapes with no central point) than triangle_fan, though I think the star here is the sort-of-thing that a single triangle_strip cannot do. That, and with numbering it only allows 62 verts (0..9, a..z, A..Z), and is a bit clunky to iterate on. Numbering, especially with a strip, is also a lot more complex as you get more verts. If I got to the point of making my own editor*, I might abstract this away so the user only works with points.

Use-in-code-wise I may have already solved fan-vs-strip with a function that just compares the values of the first few points to choose draw type, though I wasn't confident in that as it'd require a lot more testing. Might be better to store that in an enum as well.

* I wasn't quite sure of using what I already made for anything more than a simple arcade-like game, so that sort of kills motivation, needing to do even more technical work just to get visible results.