This is so far a "no strings attached" relationship game like others that follow similar logic during more than half of the story.
Eternum, MBIML and Projekt Passion on top of my head are like that even though those 3 games have Harem tags on their game threads. City of Broken Dreamers (that is completed) also follows that logic until almost the end of the game but in that one you lock on 1 LI near the end and see the corresponding ending.
So there is a few formulas for this games evolve, another advantage of this is that you require much less split saves for alternate LI paths than those that you lock on a LI early on their development and you can see almost all content with 1 playthrough save.
Some people say that those "monogamy" games give more replay ability but for me that is a false question because most of the times what I do in those is load the alternate LI save and skip the content I already saw and barely we see lot of new content, what ends to be kind of a waste of time but understandable in that formula, a few developers can deliver more content for each path but it is time consuming to develop and we know most people don't have the required patience to wait for updates

, a few developers/teams can deliver that but rarely solo developers can.
Story/plot paths is a different story though and it can be done with a plot event or with the way the MC behaves (Love/Corruption, Good/Evil, Dominant/Submissive, some even have optional NTR/NTS paths like
AlwaysFan and Inanna Revenge from the same dev, not for me but love their NO NTR way), and its in this that most Harem games or pseudo-harem like Ripples should aim for.