Would you say it's best to focus on one girl from the beginning or mingle around until given the option to commit? You've mentioned theres no penalty for now as this isnt a harem but still early game. I'm curious how you imagine the games structure as it goes forward and how much the heroines will stay involved as supporting cast when the player narrows down their route choice.
A few already asked about and I'll keep the answer more or less the same. You can currently pursue multiple girls, and you aren't actively penalized for it. But the further you go into the game, the harder it will be to try and please everyone. If a girl asks you to hang out 3 times, but each time you went somewhere else, you will see consequences. Or later in the game if you decline a girls advance, they'll remember it and it might be very hard to regain her love interest.
With that being said, this is my very first adventure in both game making, but also any story writing, so I'll do my best to make it a good mixture of entarteining and challenging, but also relatively clear if you are in a danger zone of losing a route. I won't promise, but there is an idea to help players with it in ep4 or ep4.5 ^^
I have lots of segments visualized how they should go in future, but not all is written in stone nor in full detail. The general idea (don't fully quote me on that) is to keep the girls around your life even if you decline them, just in (depending which ones of the girls) much lesser degree.