[Feature]: Custom character sprite packs via user-level override folder

[alphanury]

Pre-flight checklist

• I have searched existing issues and this is not a duplicate

Problem or motivation

First off — thanks for Pixel Agents, it's a really fun way to make multi-agent work tangible.

One small friction I've run into: the character sprites live in dist/assets/characters/char_{0..5}.png, so anything I customize locally gets wiped on the next release. I'd love to give my agents their own visual identity (small personal touch, makes the office feel like mine) without having to choose between keeping my sprites and getting your updates.

Proposed solution

A user-level override could be a lightweight way to enable this:

• A setting pixelAgents.spritesPath (string, default empty)
• When set, the extension looks in <path>/characters/char_N.png first; missing files fall back to the bundled defaults
• Same pattern could later extend to furniture / floors / walls if it's useful

A nice cross-platform default location could be globalStorageUri from the VS Code API, or ~/.config/pixel-agents/.

Zero breaking change — if the setting is empty, behavior is identical to today.

How important is this to you?

Would improve my workflow

Alternatives considered

I've considered forking the repo, disabling auto-update, or using an external watch script to re-inject sprites after each upgrade. They all work, but they each trade off something (maintenance, missed fixes, or fragility), so a first-class override felt like it might be worth raising.

Additional context

My personal use case: I name my agent setup after a Marvel-themed lineup (JARVIS, FRIDAY, PEPPER, etc.) and would love each one to have a distinct sprite. Totally a "nice to have" thing — just thought it might align with the broader direction in the README about being agent-agnostic and letting people bring their own setup.

Happy to put together a PR if you think the idea is worth pursuing — I'd just want to check with you on the API shape (setting name, path layout) before writing anything, so it lands the way you'd want it to.

Thanks again for the project!

[itsManeka]

Considering your idea, I have an interesting proposal.

Since we already have the option to use external characters, it would be interesting to have the ability to select which ones will respawn.

A menu could be made available in the Layout displaying each character with a checkbox, where you can check or uncheck which characters will be able to respawn.

This way, we don't overwrite the default characters (0 regression) and we give the user the ability to configure it.

Also, I would really love to see your sprites. Are you planning to make them available?