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I recommend to split this project in independent and small projects. When you have a big project, with many dependencies within itself, it can be ruined if a specific feature can't be implemented and it is required for the functionality of others modules/code. With small projects, if a few are unsuccessful, you still can have something functional instead of a big dysfunctional one.

I believe the project you mentioned isn't easy and i recommend to be humble and implement only the most vital parts of it. Everything else can be aggregated later as an add-on for the main hack, based if it can or can't be implemented.

I can see the following related projects, all related with guests characters and features that can't work correctly in the default game:

Roster Guests

To expand the roster selection from 14 to 16 characters with the inclusion of two guest characters.

I believe the Guest Adder patch can be used/adapted for this project.

Colosseum Guests

In the default game, guests can't be used in the Colosseum. If they are selected for the Colosseum fight, the game engine refuses to load the guest data and a bugged, empty and invisible character is loaded instead, triggering a defeat soon or later.

I tried to fix it in the Guest Adder patch but i was unsuccessful. As an alternative, i denied the selection of guests for the Colosseum in the patch.

Guest Magic

The magic command doesn't work correctly with guests in the default game. I don't know about the MMMagic update patch, but i tried the magic command in the guests with the imbued magic hack and apparently the game engine has a few hard coded settings if magic is used by guests characters. In my case, the spell list for the magic command is empty for the guests, except for his summon spell.

About the Guest Adder patch, to clarify, it doesn't modify the magic system code.

Guest equipment

Guests characters can't change equipment. This restriction can be bypassed and guests can equip items like other characters. However, a few issues arise.

First, there isn't a flag for the guests in the item data to determine if the guests can equip it. An option is to use the imp and merit award flags but their features probably must be abolished from the game.

Second, in shops, in the lower part of the screen, the characters does an animation based if the item is equip-able and if it actually upgrade/downgrade the character. There isn't space for the two guests characters in it. I suppose the two guest characters can be ignored but it should be nice if you know if the item can or can't be used by the guests in shops, somehow...

Guest sprites

The number of sprites sheets and portraits are limited in the default game. If you want to add news one, they must be expanded and their correspondent graphics must be created/imported.

New commands

I believe the number of actual commands can't be expanded because of hard coded features or because it should be really difficult. But if you want a new command for the guests characters, it must be implemented in assembly. The complexity of the new command is proportional to the difficulty of the implementation.

The easy way is to call a specific spell when the command is used. Unfortunately, probably a old command must be sacrificed for the new one. Another option is to use a multiple function command. The command can check the character identifier who uses it and change its behavior accordingly. As example, it can trigger a specific spell for the first guest, another specific spell for the second guest and a default spell for everyone else.