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Thanks - and yes, it is ambitious, but my view has always been one release at a time, and we'll see where we get to, although always good to have a destination and a rough story mapped out!

In terms of paths being mutually exclusive vs multiple partners, this will vary depending on the character and path taken, but there certainly will be options to take multiple partners at once, sometimes via cheating/secrecy, sometimes in a more open way. 

And I don't consider that throwing shade at all, it is a worthwhile question to raise, this space is filled with abandoned games from developers who burn out/bite off more than they can chew. I've gone in with my eyes open, I talk about this a lot in my dev diaries, how I am trying to make the workload sustainable each month. A few other people have asked me about how I plan to keep the branching nature of the game manageable - there's a number of facets to this, but I think the main one to highlight is that I will approach it the same way lots of other RPGs do.

A good example of this I think is Baldur's Gate 3 (I'm not claiming I will quite be able to match BG3 level as a solo dev, but the general approach is a good one). Whilst there is a ton of choice and ways to play the game and numerous outcomes, there are set 'beats' to the story everyone follows. Act 1 is always centred around the Druid's Grove and Camp of the Absolute, and there are numerous ways that can end. But then it converges again on Act 2, where regardless of choices beforehand, you then follow again a new arc in the shadowlands, which again can have multiple outcomes, and so on, and so forth. 

Another good example are the KOTOR games where each planet is a set 'act' that you play through, and can make whatever choices you want there, and then you go to the next planet, and whilst certain past choices may influence certain things, by and large the next act is its own self contained thing. 

In this way you avoid the unsustainable branching that quickly makes a game impossible to keep up with development wise:

Of course, it is a bit more complicated than that, as you are effectively dealing with multiple storylines (e.g. the main storyline, the storyline for each relationship, minor storylines) that may sometimes intersect with others. But by keeping all these storylines to a model that looks more like the diagram on the right, it becomes a lot easier to deal with!