4 Years of Service
The player should see as much of your game as possible. Don't have entire storylines on split paths, don't have individual LIs, don't even let players choose between 2 LIs (you know those "go to X to meet A or go to Y to meet B"). It's tempting to go "I want to portray realistic relationships" and "player choice matters", but for the dev and the player, the most important thing is that you're not wasting effort on scenes and characters that players won't see. If you have 5 LIs and make a scene for each, you spent time making 5 scenes, and players will see 1 scene (20%) and wonder why the update is so short. "Do multiple saves", well how many actually does that? At most you'd have 2 or 3 paths. If you really want to have different LI or story paths, just keep it to 2 or 3. Make everyone else side characters, then you can focus on just a few main ones. Even the proper visual novels like Telltale don't have such complicated stories and branching paths. It always comes back.
