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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."