itch.io

The alt history setting is a response to Student Transfer (a body swap visual novel I used to help make) having its own "San Fransokyo" setting it never explains and me vowing to not do that myself. It (the Stephen King novel) was a partial inspiration in that the main character is secretly the town itself through the unbelievably rich and detailed history that is told throughout the story that keeps changing perspective and time frames. I can't say I've matched King during his 80's cocaine bender, but I have done that to a smaller scale, much of which isn't visible to the average reader. I swear it is in fact really important that this setting is the way it is, but it's for reasons I can't explain without ungodly massive spoilers.

Samantha is probably my favorite character to write as I get to be clever through her. Her character is at least partly inspired by the dramatic awfulness of my own mother, but dialed up to 12 and made more sympathetic with the possibility of a redemption arc. But just as I say with Z, they need to work to earn their happy ending, and that must come with a recognition of all of her own flaws.

Before I throw my own wall of text at you, thank you for writing all of this out. I know more than most typing takes time and effort, and I'll make the effort to match.

I know people have issues with the intro, but re:Dreamer is meant to one day be a long visual novel (at least 40 hours per main route). In that context, an intro of an hour or less (much of which you are given the option to skip!) is not just justified but mandatory.

I very firmly and passionately believe gender bender is a kink of contrasts. I'll skip the pseudo-intellectual lecture about how it's a genre uniquely suited to building around the singular pillar of what is ultimately the only story a person can ever tell when you strip it to its base element (what it means to be a person) and jump ahead to the pith: knowing more of who Zach is as a person before the transformation even happens is necessary for giving the type of contrast I need for the story I want to tell with him.

To that end, I have given Zach an intro that sets the entire tone of the game as most of its topics and themes, such as:

• The process of "showing the work" of who Zach is and how they change matters far more than the destination.
• The ego Zach has built about their self-styled maverickish intelligence is a crutch and protective wall of isolation that is making them miserable but which they cling to because it's easier to be smart than it is to be wise.
• Their toxic relationship with their mother, who acts as a sympathetic antagonist where it's up for the reader to decide if she's redeemable and someone Zach or Zoey can trust again, a dramatic foil across generations who herself is a victim of an abusive mother, a black hole who has shaped and warped Zach's views of women (often for the worse), and a larger-than-life figure who casts a suffocating shadow over him or her, both as an impossibly high bar to match and as a control freak.
• That re:Dreamer is going to be a psychologically-focused story with a very introspective protagonist, as shown through a lecture that also introduces the concept of a personality matrix (as it is a feature in the visual novel) (I don't have a psychology degree, but I have taken a few semesters of it at college and have maintained at least a passing interest in it).
• How Zach is stuck and wanting to change but needs a powerful catalyst and someone to react with to make that change happen.

I'll readily admit that there might have been a more condensed way to do that, but all my thinking on the intro over the last few years has only reinforced my view that it has to be there and it's about as lean as I can make it without cutting away the meat of the story to compromise brevity over depth. It acts as a sort of skill gate, because to be honest, if a player stopped after less than an hour, there's not much of a chance they'd like to stick around for more nor care that I think context makes porn way hotter.

I have many thoughts about gender (as you might suspect lol), but I'd like to think I have enough respect for the topic to avoid pandering with easy layups that I know would please certain crowds. Doing so would be a disservice to readers when I know could deliver something better and more meaningful. re:Dreamer isn't really "a transgender game" as some have tried to frame it and I reject that limitation; in fact, one of its design goals is to widen someone's views of identity and present a more nuanced view than "this character was always a girl." It's a weird celebration of the uniqueness of identity meant to be thought about with deliberate ambiguity meant to foster that. I'll sometimes use modern queer terminology when it makes sense and I can't claim I don't find myself rambling on my soapbox every so often, but I'm hardly a gender guru. I'm a weird person with a weird genderfluid identity who doesn't have anything even close all the answers, but I have confidence in my ability to ask good questions.

I love having a lot of attention to detail and like when someone notices the time and effort to put into it. The expression system helps sell the nuance of the story, and I'm shocked that neither my method of separating faces into distinct eyes, eyebrows, and mouths and the exponentially greater range of facial expression I have access to nor focus on sound design is common. I wanna be a quirky bohemian auteur, and I can't understand how people hate making the parts of a visual novel I love to tinker with. It's a multimedia format, and the more I embrace that aspect, the more those parts synchronize to tell a story that punches far above its weight class in impact.

No lol, but I tried anyways on some

Either "One Dream" by  Uyama Hiroto from  A Son of the Sun or "Aruarian Dance" by Nujabes from Samurai Champloo Music Record 1 - Departure

Not yet, sadly.

Nope, still here. Just stuck in art revision hell right now, but I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel after 2+ months of work with tons of 12+ hour days.

https://itch.io/post/11347935

I have to package the APK in a ZIP due to legal reasons of clearly-labeled credits for assets, to say nothing of it including the flowchart and changelog. I have an Android, and you can absolutely use the Files app to extract ZIP files.

Thank you so much for the feedback, and I'm glad you enjoyed the VN! My health is never going to be good, but I'm at least past the hurdle of the back-to-back cat scratch disease + mononucleosis, my new antidepressants are helping a lot, and I'm able to sit in front of a computer and actually expect to get a full day of work done instead of having to play everything by ear because of my bad & inconsistent energy levels.

Art is the primary reason. I didn't have art for it commissioned yet and I wasn't going to do a second scene in a story day where it's two characters having sex through sprites. The monetary costs of those CGs aren't even too much of a concern, but they take a lot of my time to make the design docs for, it takes an artist a few months to get the scene done, and then I have to edit the files to work within Ren'Py. If I stop work for art, this visual novel will not only never get done, but those scenes with the art aren't going to be nearly as good as they could be if I spent more time writing the characters to have a better idea of who they are and how they work so that when they have sex it is an extension of their dynamic rather than erotic revelry for the sake of erotic revelry. My priority is always going to be developing the story and its characters, and that specific scene is not at all a load-bearing scene to that story. If it's going to exist, it'll be as something that moves the plot forward, and there are just other scenes that take higher priority of the bottlenecks of art and my own limited time on this earth.

The other less important reason is that development is slower than in other similar games because of my attention to detail in development and that I am essentially a solo developer (see this previous comment I made for the specifics). If I limited updates to a full story day each time, this game's updates would come out spaced several months apart even in the best of circumstances because writing is merely a fraction of my job, and I'd rather release the game in chunks more frequently so I can get more immediate feedback on what did or didn't work as that has been instrumental in making me a better developer and more specifically a better writer. If I don't have confidence in an idea, I have the luxury of being able to move ahead in the story and to put off the specifics until I have a better idea of what I want that placeholder scene to be. This not only speeds up development by letting me circumvent a plot idea until I have full confidence in my ability to execute it as well as I can so I can do something I do have a much clearer picture for, but it improves the overall quality of the game by removing the pressure of the bottleneck of having to do the next chronological event. If I have learned any lesson during development, it's that it's not just faster but better for overall quality to make sure I do something right the first time instead of going back to fix it later.

I don't think I need to say this, but don't click those suspicious links in the comments left by botted accounts.

It's in the works, yes.

My vote for that goes to the chest binder

Could you specify and/or give screenshots?

It's a text file within the game files labeled Music Sources.txt

The start of the game is dense as I want to make sure the trajectory of each route is firmly established with the first week of showing what Zach's day-to-day life with a female body (and hiding it) looks like with classes, romance/sex life, extracurricular activities, and social life so that readers can fill in the gaps made by timeskips of a few days or even a few weeks. All routes will anchor loosely around holidays and school breaks, most notably Halloween, Thanksgiving break, Zach's 21st birthday (December 7th; the game starts on October 7th), Christmas, winter break, New Year's Eve and Day, Valentine's Day, and spring break. While not getting into spoilers, each route will have additional focal points (e.g., Britney with the theater club and visiting her family for Thanksgiving break, Keisuke with the swim team), but the game will have an epilogue starting from when the re:Dreamer season ends at close to the end of Zach's freshman year to a few weeks after he graduates so the story ends with a clear idea of what's next in his life. The game can't realistically end with Zach changing his body back due to Zach using his wish for something else he sees as being worth more, but just because this character keeps a female body won't necessarily mean that he will be a woman even though that's probably what most readers are going to get because of the story choices they made.

Tower Topper is possible to "win" by proving to Britney that the game is rigged and impossible to win by getting to the top line and showing how the block skips over the winning position. You can further "win" the game once Ai rigs it by not making any mistakes that expose how she's not just made the game winnable but impossible to lose. Each game is meant to be a thematic lesson of sorts, with this one highlighting not just Zach's unhealthy amount of prideful stubbornness is a product of an environment where he never had to compromise to avoid failure because someone was always around to protect Zach from facing any negative consequences (his mom, Keisuke, and now Ai), and he's never really acknowledged that outside help beyond resenting it.

Dance Uprising is winnable, but it's very hard. The high scores were set by someone I know who is really good at rhythm games, and what I made isn't a good rhythm game in that the notes had to be procedurally generated based on the peaks of the audio file which won't always line up with a beat. Its lesson is that Zach doesn't necessarily have to suffer consequences with experimenting with femininity if he can trust Britney enough to let her help or save him when he missteps, but he should still try to take middle approach of not being too enthusiastic nor too defiant.

Zone of the Zombies 2 is survivable, but I wouldn't call it humanly beatable. The speed you shoot at is far important than your accuracy, and while it might be possible to drop every zombie if you spam both mouse buttons like a demon, it's not a reasonable expectation. It's meant to be a lesson about being distracted with the wrong objective yet trying to conquer it by himself meant to tie into how Zach's goals with re:Dreamer, but more specifically how Zach sabotages himself when he tries to fight Britney to prove her wrong instead of teaming up with her as an equal partner.

Mrs. Puck Man isn't playable, and it isn't a lesson so much as it is a metaphor for many aspect of Zach's masculinity. He talks a big game about knowing way more about the cabinet than you would expect given the impression he exudes of never actually playing it. He feels upset when Britney offers to pay for it and can feel even more upset when she says "ladies first" as a dig. His forceful manhandling of it when he feels it isn't working can result in breaking part of it (the joystick being a further metaphor for the body part he no longer has and yes I have to word it like this for itch.io). Even if it's a relic of the past, he still feels bad about having broken it with a lingering sadness of disappointment for what could have been but never was. If he's played both Tower Topper and Mrs. Puck Man he can feel so bad that he will even go to the manager's office before he leaves and give back the expensive game console he won on the condition that they use that saved money to repair the cabinet instead of hauling it to the dumpster.

This was more than you asked, but I like giving details like this.

Still on the 2 steps forward, 1 step back incline. I am able to pull a few really long days in a row again (we're talking 12+ hours which is the environment where I and my writing skills thrive), but my energy levels and memory are still painfully inconsistent and unpredictable

https://itch.io/post/11347935

I have to package the APK in a ZIP due to legal reasons of clearly-labeled credits for assets, to say nothing of it including the flowchart and changelog. I have an Android, and you can absolutely use the Files app to extract ZIP files.

Chief, what? You control the settings of the game. If you want Zach to ramble or introspect less, there is literally an option for that. If you do not want the dev commentary setting, turn that setting off. If you do not want to fill out a survey of a game that has a notably queer playerbase, then don't.

Keisuke route revisions to the day 2 morning to fix up some continuity issues and write the characters with a far better understanding of them than I had about 4 years ago

I'd prefer not to use that term for a number of reasons, but I hope you enjoy it

I'd prefer not to use that term for a number of reasons, but I'm glad you enjoyed it

https://discord.gg/hVJJa5qaCC

As I have stated, I do not have easy access to any older versions. They would require recompiling on a version of the engine which is no longer supported. Attempting to roll back my development files while tracking down a specific older version of an engine with frequent incompatible updates without even knowing what version of that engine I need would to even run the game would be a tedious and frustrating process that quite bluntly I will not give the hours of my unfairly time to make possible when I am still sick with an illness that has lead to me months behind work on the current update.
Please do not ask this again. You have asked me over three times (I'm not quite sure if your other messages were asking similarly), and my answer will not change.

Also, I have checked the Discord link on my main account and my alt, both of which it worked for.

Yes, as I said, the server is public. The invite link is on this page. I do not have access to the 0.13.2 release anymore, and to be blunt, the writing was bad and pretty rapey, which is completely incompatible with Keisuke's character.

The server is public, but as the changelog shows, there's been so much content added since that version, and I generally ask that readers play on the latest version for the best experience.

I am rewriting those morning scenes in the pending update to make sense. The writing that used to be there in the sento and morning was honestly rough enough that it made me cringe in discomfort, and I don't think it's simply me being my own harshest critic: it's largely uninteresting, I've gotten much better at understanding Zach and Keisuke as characters between then and now, and it's frankly not even good smut.

I usually don't hold on to old versions dues to not wanting to pay for the storage space in a file hosting service (underlying Ren'Py engine changes with large swathes of script incompatibility makes it very tedious and frustrating to compile old releases from GitHub files), but surprisingly, I still have the 0.17.0 files on Mediafire with the sento old scene:

• https://www.mediafire.com/file/2m9x4b54jxlq66l/reDreamer-0.17.0-pc.zip/file
• https://www.mediafire.com/file/kefnrgmb8edfvt0/reDreamer-0.17.0-mac.zip/file
• https://www.mediafire.com/file/vdytr003do2kw9y/reDreamer-0.17.0-android.zip/file

Again though, I am currently rewriting the cut part and the day 2 morning scenes. I am truly flattered you like my writing enough to want to sift through the parts left on the cutting room floor, but cut content from older versions make for a very poor reflection of how much better I have gotten as an author in the last 4 years or so, and it won't even be "canon" in the near future.

It was cut for making so little sense at this point in the story. It'll come back in another form later when it actually makes sense to have Z and Keisuke being open/freaky enough to have outright sex in a semi-public area

Can you clarify what you are trying to say?

I am not writing pregnancy

(This largely pasted from a pinned message already in the VN's Discord server.)

This visual novel is largely a solo project as of 2025, with my (CaptainCaption)'s roles in being:

• The writing, although given how Ren'Py works with interwoven text, graphics, and audio, it's more accurate to say that this part is more akin to working in film in scriptwriting and directing with making many of its parts merge into a cohesive whole.
• The bulk of the coding (minus when Espeon, my producer, rescues my incompetent ass from the horrible cargo cult code I've made).
• Designing and making all of the GUI assets (minus what I can get from icon packs).
• Creating design documents, some for the story, but mostly for artists' use.
• (Largely) finding the artists to commission to make the art those design documents detail.
• Managing the vast majority of the communication with those commissioned artists.
• Editing the art we've receive for stylistic consistency and functionality within the Ren'Py game engine.
• Community management on Patreon, social media, forum posting, and Discord, which includes distributing the game every release.

I try to remember to keep this list current to give credit where credit is due, but the only parts I do not make myself are:

• The Ren'Py engine itself, but which I still modify from its stock form.
• The art I need to commission artists for, even if I often heavily edit the final delivery of the artist's final delivery.
• The royalty-free backgrounds I purchase (along a few more visual elements, such as textures, stock photos, and vector images for the icons on Zach's phone), but I have heavily edited some of these images and would argue that I outright made the GUI and Zach's phone screen.
• Making the songs and SFX, but I have edited many song to loop properly when they do not initially and edited some SFX to remove noise or provide an echoic reverb to demonstrate the large size of certain rooms.
• The fonts and certain text effects, such as an occasional wave effect.
• The core code of the admittedly shitty arcade games, with my modifications ranging from minor to a near-total overhaul.
• The core code of the in-game encyclopedia.
• The one-time use digital clock in Zach's dream.
• The tools I use to make this game. As a non-comprehensive list, that is:
  • Visual Studio Code and its extensions (although I have heavily modified the Ren'Py extension and made a customized solarized theme from an extant one).
  • Audacity and its filters.
  • Clip Studio Paint.
  • Adobe Photoshop 2024.
  • Inkscape.
  • ImageMagick.
  • XnConvert.
  • Waifu2x-Extension-GUI.
  • itch.io's upload service and various file hosting websites.
  • Bulk Rename Utility (it does exactly what it says it does for filenames).
  • Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
  • Miscellaneous Python utilities (such as an audio file converter and equalizer and word count tool).
• Vestigial leftovers from the very first release of re:Dreamer being built off Student Transfer's V4 codespace (which I asked the devs for permission to use, which I was graciously granted). To my knowledge, their only modifications from that release still left in re:Dreamer are:
  • Changes to how text displays in dialogue to use smart quotes and wait for dialogue to finish animating before giving a choice screen.
  • Building a file list from scanning folders for files of certain extensions.
  • A few custom statements like the "placeholder" end-of-content screen.
  • Some of the code for the messaging system on Zach's phone.
  • Minor parts of GUI asset, such as the "quickbar" at the bottom of the in-game textbox and the Save/Load screen's layout.

I mean, from the CDC:

People who get symptoms from EBV infection, usually teenagers or adults, get better in 2 to 4 weeks. However, some people may feel fatigued for several weeks or even months.
...
After you get an EBV infection, the virus becomes latent (inactive) in your body. In some cases, the virus may reactivate. This does not always cause symptoms, but people with weakened immune systems are more likely to develop symptoms if EBV reactivates.

My health is rather not good in the first place, and the feminizing HRT I am stuck on because my life is a nightmare causes symptoms somewhat akin to a woman's menstrual cycle, most notably in this case a monthly weakening of my immune system.

Then I have succeeded in making you feel some of the doubt and mistrust Zoey is feeling right now (and being evil).

I lean more toward the side that some of Samantha's behavior was calculatingly manipulative and planned ahead and some was opportunistically manipulative and played by ear, but most of it was genuine. Of course, it being genuine might hurt Zoey even more, because as Zoey perceives it, it means her mom could have chosen to be the mom her son needed at any given time and chose not to until her kid finally because what she wanted and someone she could vicariously live through to an even greater degree.

But ambiguity and open interpretation are key design goals of this game, so don't take what I say as word of God. From the knowledge that readers have which Zach doesn't, it might be easier to see Samantha as a broken woman who is forcing herself to pull herself back together through will alone to help her child when they very, very desperately need that help, especially when she feels guilt for making their child need her so much more and her unusual kindness and openness is part of her way of apologizing. But it might also be seen as a failed and exceedingly manipulative mother desperately grabbing at a golden ticket to at least some semblance of not failing spectacularly when it came to the family life she wants more than anything (or living through her daughter), and her overenthusiasm and years of worsening mental health led to her being sloppy for once.

I will say that there was a lot of intentionality behind the framing of that visit to the Legally Distinct Build-A-Bear and turning what is seemingly an overdue mother-daughter bonding experience with genuinely touching moments into an extended metaphor of how Zoey feels like her own mother has spent two decades trying to make Zoey in her own image and is even doing that now, and the heavy tone of that insightful family drama and friction is meant to contrast with the somewhat childish naivety Zoey has about how her mother's daughter might get along with her better than her son ever did.

I have a neurodegenerative disease, chief

No no, I get it, and I am even more surprised than you are. Ever since I was four years old, I thought I would be doing engineering and thus penned myself as the edgy "emotions are stupid and art is wasteful" STEM type. The fact that I ended up with a career as a writer is still shocking to me even after 5 years, to say nothing of how I am allegedly good at what I do and am very much in the vein of a bohemian auteur author stereotype, coffee addiction included.

Actually no, lol. Zach ended up getting a fair number of pieces of me because I write what I know (e.g., being miserable and trying to find solace in intelligence, acting like you're only lonely because you're better than anyone else, severe OCD but not realizing it because your understanding of it is so limited), but I truly don't think of myself as being this man (nor would I want to). For an actual self-insert, look at a ton of Scribble Hub stories and the sprite viewer within re:Dreamer. There's a canon answer to which character I am within the story, and it's the character with sprites tied to the developer commentary system (which you can unlock with the patron password, which is in the changelog of this version).

No, just been sick as fuck with mono I am still recovering from over 5 months later. I have still tried to work on the game as much as I can, but my energy levels are unpredictable and my memory has been full of  a worrying amount of  holes. I can either work and produce subpar stuff I'll not only have to redo later but will likely have foggy recollections of, or I can just suck this up and ride out the storm to write as well as I know I can; besides, the update is already 90% finished and it'd be dumb to botch the last bit.

It's finally been on the mend since mid/late February, but progress within the release has been a bit slow as I build up steam to really get cooking. I'm in a good-enough place mentally that I am now starting to have ideas and outlines I write down with passion (which you can check out as pinned messages in the the #redreamer-chat channel of the VN's Discord server), but typing stuff on my phone while stuck in bed to expand upon ideas I want to get to isn't the same as being able to be up and do all the juggled tasks I have on a daily basis (e.g., writing, coding, composing scenes, finding and editing music and SFX, making design documents for artists and contacting them, checking art, editing art for consistency, checking discord, checking sites this game gets distributed to). I can now have those 14-hour days again, but it's just very hard to plan things right now.

Nah, no worries, and it was a fun question to answe

Please don't fight over me like this. It's a bit weird and uncomfortable, and I don't ask people to be my stewards or secretaries and speak for me, and I am more than capable of using my own voice to speak for myself (but you wouldn't be able to stop me from yapping anyways because I love the sound of my own keyboard and at this point rambling verbosity and snarky wit are my stress responses).

I'm not going to be rude to people for expressing concern over my medical health even if it comes from a place of partial ignorance because I've got a whole really complicated and hard to understand mess of health issues of various rarity and severity. I appreciate the gesture of kindness that comes with stating concern for my health, so long as it doesn't come off as a hollow platitude said for the person talking to me to feel better about the raw magnitude of how bad that health is so they can escape that uncomfortable topic with a pat on their back for doing nothing but highlighting how they don't and can't understand what I go through.

Yes, I drink too much coffee, and I know it's exacerbating my anxiety issues. But I'm really pressed for options when I'm still struggling to even get out of bed with the inconsistent echoes of mononucleosis exhaustion I've been fighting, to say nothing of how much CBS already gives me an extra dimension of fatigue separate from muscular overexertion and tiredness from poor sleep. I'm racing a clock in a pretty morbid way, and the idea of staying in bed and wasting away genuinely terrifies me enough to burn the candle at both ends with a flamethrower.

Do I like being a jittery mess to make sure I can spend a whole day out of bed? Eh... kinda? It gives me tunnel vision that for all its banes comes with a zen-like coffee fugue state where I tap into my extremely detailed-oriented side where I can both make the writing I'm working on have that exacting precision of wording I demand from it and make my runaway internal monologue into a storm of good ideas coming from that place of being so deeply immersed in what I am writing that I might forget reality exists. Is that worth the tradeoff of worsened anxiety and detachment reality from when I already have OCD and a dissociative disorder masquerading as a gender identity? It depends, but I can tell you I've gotten some of the best writing of my life done in a caffeinated haze and I truly think this brings the peaks out of my own style of writing. Do I wish I didn't have to drink like half a pot of coffee a day if I want to guarantee being up for at least 16 hours? Yes, but I'm an embarrassingly oversharing writer who doesn't let facts or the realities of my situation interfere with telling a good story about it, and, like, I'm never not going to be the STEM-brained tinkerer I would've been if my OCD didn't obliterate my ability to do math more complicated than a tip. I truly never expected writing would ever be my career (let alone this type of writing), but now that I'm here, and now that I'm a weird bohemian auteur of an author, I kind of just embrace the insanity and the stereotype of being a tragic artist/writer, and I have an almost blithe pride in how I drink way, way too much coffee.

Like, it's enough of a joke that I drink stupid amounts of coffee that my friend Cai drew this art of my "authorial mascot" based on this art by melonenbrot. I might not be a hot mess of a redheaded anime chick, but I sure do feel like I'm more "me" the more coffee I drink a day.

I'm not leaving out the potential for a name swap option within the script as an extra feature someday, I feel like it's a really half-assed approach to only do the name when the entire visual novel is about identity and gender identity specifically.

First, I need to clarify that I try to treat Zach's character with the due respect that I'd try to give a real person, and my rules have been "Zach is the person," "Zoey is the body, social role, and (maybe) bedroom role (until a point if Zach decides he'd rather not be called that)," and "Z is either me being lazy with a catch-all epicene name, the character having more than one potential gender at that point, or a nickname Zach decides to use."

Their name is technically a variable within the code of the game that could be edited by the user (I've only somewhat recently been starting to write new content where the male, female, and "nb" name are all variables used by the named character "z" in say statements and other variable determine which of those names are used), but adding more to the script itself would be a slow process of me going through the game's existing lines and changing all of Zach's spoken lines and all previous mentions of Zach, Zoey, or Z into variable tags that a player could slot their own variables of names into, but there's a bigger issue which has stopped me from doing this.

It isn't just that there's a lot going on with the name in the story, that Zach uses a shortened version of his full name which he hates being called and none of that writing would make sense unless the player supplied a name and its extended version (which it might not even have), or even that I am still surprised people self-insert into a main character I went out of my way to make such an excessively detailed person which is the exact opposite of how over 90% of visual novels treat their faceless protagonist so I have some qualms about turning a character drama into a self-insert story (God knows I've been accused of that enough already): it's that this would be a borderline impossible thing to do in practice because doing this type of substitution with the gender of the pronouns.

The key roadblock is pronouns even do in sentences: they're referential shortcuts based on context. As an example, saying something as simple as, "Zach and Britney entered the room, but he went first and she followed behind him" gets really messy really fast when you have two characters of the same gender. In this case here, in order to remove ambiguity, I not only have to remove the pronoun to refer to Zoey, but I have to do that with Britney as well, as anything besides, "Zoey and Britney entered the room, but Zoey went in first and Britney followed behind her" doesn't clarify things correctly. It's a rather well-known issue with writing two characters of the same gender, and Keisuke's route in particular makes this so much harder than I would like it to be. Not only would I have to rewrite several thousands of sentences to work with this change, but the verb tense changes depending on a singular binary pronoun set vs an epicene "gender neutral" pronoun set, e.g., "Zach is a dork. He plays games on his phone." vs "Zach is a dork. They play games on their phone."

While writing from Zach's first-person perspective mitigates some of these issues, it still affects dialogue from other people in regards to Zach, and while I would like it to correctly gender the protagonist in the world information entries depending on the current events of who they are, this gets significantly more complex than you might expect, to the point that I just might eschew it given how much of the rest of an entire game I have to make.

This was way too much text to say "Hey, name swaps are a hypothetical thing I could do, but it's gonna take so much more work than people recognize for a feature few people would use and this isn't even a story meant for people to self-insert with in the first place."