My problem is that I want a permanent image (portrait sprite) to display along with each character as they speak. I don't mean a smaller version of the character sprite displayed. In my VN, my characters are heavily pixelated, and in this style I want there to be a head shot of the character in a particular position to the left, above the text box as the character speaks. 

I'm requesting a mechanism that allows us to link an image (and it's various settings as it would be in the library) to a character. Like, as in my screenshot, every time Kai Palakiko speaks, this portrait image of him shows up, and invariably goes away when a different character is speaking. This would remove so much work, as I'm only in the prologue and clicking the small "show image" and "hide image" for every single line is intense and I feel as if it could be mitigated. 

Of course, I recognize if it is really difficult or would potentially screw up the engine! I am only recommending it for my sake. I am not sure how much it would affect the community as a whole. ...and maybe it was already thought of and rejected because of a coding thing I'm not aware of. I don't know, I'm not a game developer. 

If you read this or took some thought in it, I greatly appreciate it! 

@BeautifulDays thank you for the suggestion, although we think we probably won't be making anymore drastic changes to CloudNovel visual novel game engine, this might be something we will look into as we build CloudRPG, our third game engine. So thank you for the suggestion, we will definitely keep this in mind for our final cloud HTML5 game engine.