Goodness, I really do apologize for sounding like that. I see what you mean, in retrospect. By no means did I say that either you or Chutup were not good enough, nor did I say I wanted to totally take over the project Okay, I pretty much said that, but that was not what I meant. I was suggesting using a smaller engine that I developed that does these things. I can see how you feel, and I really apologize for my ignorance.
That's OK, don't worry about it.
I can offer programming advice and sprite art, then, most of the advice is mostly cleanup. Pardon for being sudden on such, but for instance, it could be easier to simply compile images and objects into one to save file space. What I mean is, you could place all of those portraits into one sprite file. Then, you can delete the rest of those portrait objects and just have one. You can use the ID number of each specific object in the level editor (careful!) and just use ID numbers, such as 1532000.x instead of portrait_naija.x and still have the same effect, except with reduced filesize. Further info is in the help file, and it comes in handy.
You might save a tiny bit of space by putting all the portraits into a single image, but not much. Twelve 48*48 sprites are not going to be a whole lot bigger than one 84*288 background.
Using ID numbers sounds pretty pointless to me, it would add a lot of hassle without really gaining anything. The only thing you would do is reduce the number of objects in the library, again producing probably a very minimal difference in file size. On the other hand if you ever wanted to rearrange the characters' portraits for whatever reason, you would have to drag them around in the image editor and then painstakingly retype all the ID numbers in the cursor object's code.
Using this style to make Iji would be pretty cool, so I think I might do that.
Now you're sounding condescending again. I've already pledged to work on Iji, so it's a bit rude to just come in and say you'll do it.
Furthermore, I don't understand how you would apply this 'style' to coding a character, since the only methods you described above related to handling of the character select screen. Can you explain what you mean by that?