If someone is so against a trans character, maybe they shouldn't play a game that has a trans character as the main LI.
Just a thought.
But I don't disagree that Luxee handled the whole situation poorly, but I think that is mostly down to choosing to make this a sandbox. Sandbox's are hardly ever multi-route games, it's too complicated to code. So he took the easy (and overboard) route of literally killing her route off. And the MC literally went on as if nothing happened, total psycho.
Or it could be that he just doesn't want to make a friendship Nea path. If I recall, he didn't like the wife-only route in PL so he intentionally avoided developing it for as long as he could. One of the reasons he chose sandbox is specifically so he would have less to do (fewer transition/filler scenes). Of which a friendship Nea route would pretty much be made of.
If he didn't want to make a friendship route, he never should have said there would be one, which is exactly what he did say only for what was thought to be that friendship route to end in death. The odd thing is, contrary to the way most end up, sandbox games are supposed to have equal or greater numbers of routes as there are many combinations to go with for endings whereas most VNs are set to have specific paired and single routes, he simply chose the wrong genre of game if he thought this was going to be less work. Also, for Nea's friendship route, all he has to do is make slight variants of existing dialogue and block off sex scenes in the code, which is one of if not THE easiest task in most coding languages.I told myself I wouldn't come back as pretty much everything I said got deleted for "trolling". Which is laughable to me. Was sooo very not my intent but whatever. I LIKED Nea. I romanced Nea. I just hated the handling of her story. I also stated in deleted comments that it had NOTHING to do with trans but with the subject of suicide. One I feel strongly about having felt its effects too many times. Essentially the dev took a character I liked and made me not like them because to me the selfishness of the act in how it was done is just awful. She literally just waits till he leaves then ends herself. The emotional trauma that leaves behind is as I said before unconscionable. I get it. She has issues. If she really cared about MC though she wouldn't do that to him regardless of rejection hurt. If someone is willing to scar the person they love so much then what they really felt was never truly love. Furthermore making her the lynchpin character may have been a bad choice. In conclusion, this got blown out of proportion and has soured my experience here as far as participating in threads.
Darklord, I agree entirely here. Nea doesn't love the MC, this is essentially the reverse of Stockholm Syndrome, Nea took the fact that the MC saved Nea from aggressors and ran with it into the realm of love born out of attachment to Nea's savior. Also, I've said it before, but again you are correct on the jump itself. Nea only ended up hurting the MC by doing that, I mean, besides the whole death thing. It only caused more pain and all of it was over getting rejected by the MC.
I agree, moving Nea to a safer place would have been the better decision if the intent was to write Nea out. Of course, that only takes into account a planned write out, not one based on reaction to players who have a hate for trans people. The whole Nea focus thing was NOT how this game started, I've been here since day one and it started with a more generalized approach that made even Nea simply one of the love interests, then came the focus on Nea. Everything outside the game still has that generalized feel, the mom is still a huge focus on official channels as far as what is advertised. The biggest part of what you said in the first section is that Luxee worked hard to make Nea platonically likeable, which does not automatically translate to romantically likeable and that causes the character to suffer losses in willingness to pursue romance.I get the impression that they don't want the friendship path either. The wife-only path was pretty short, and I remember Luxee not being happy the entire time they worked on that update.
At the same time, they've worked hard to make Nea a likeable (in a platonic sense) character that the player wants to help, regardless of any other motives. If Luxee wanted to write Nea out, they could have had the MC help get Nea out of their father's house and maybe move cross-country to stay with their more tolerant aunt or something, and that's the last we hear of Nea. To me that actually makes more sense, as people move away all of the time and get forgotten. Someone killing themselves in high school, or dying? Even the most unliked or unknown individual will suddenly get candlelight vigils and memorials placed for them. There's immediate and ongoing impact to people, at least for a while.
I think Nea would have worked more as one of several separate but independent love interests. That's how the game makes you think it will be if you don't have outside knowledge. You think it's going to be an incest romp with some other choices to fill out your potential harem with. Or give Nea her own solo game, even if it's done in a handful of updates. Nea's story doesn't fit in with the rest of the game. Nea's story isn't one that you can weave in with the MC also pursuing and actively screwing other women. That seems like that would be even more likely to end with Nea killing herself.
But I don't think you can easily make a game with an "optional" character as the focus, and have so many other love interests depend on their story. Luxee set himself up to fail here. I won't fault him for making the game he wants, or possibly not being up for the task they set for themselves. But I will fault them for trying to make a game that was more than they wanted and in the process setting their sights too high, and then neglecting other stories and just poorly handling a lot of stuff. It's still early in the game. Stuff can be undone. Other characters can be focused on. But I'm not necessarily optimistic it will happen. I think updates will just continue to take longer and longer to complete as he realizes more the mess they've created and lose motivation.
I absolutely agree on Nea's story not meshing with the other aspects. Your romp is likely to get Nea to jump anyway, even as a lover on the romance path, because it has been made obvious that Nea is not the sharing type.
You can't make a character that is supposed to be optional a focus, plain and simple, that's not how "optional" works. The "optional" nature of such a character gets in the way because, let's say a player doesn't want said optional character at all, then it throws off the entire game. So not playing with Nea while Nea is a focus would throw the entire game off.