Does the friend route for these characters have different cutscenes unique to being friends, or does it just cut out certain scenes? It would be nice to see something different depending on your relationship with the character but I don't code so not really criticism just curiosity.
hello! it's kind of a complicated answer, but i'll try my best
when you choose not to pursue a character romantically, that becomes your canon choice. it does not simply skip their h-content; it makes it so it never happens. when you choose to not pursue a character romantically, dialogue definitely changes to reflect that you two are simply friends (or perhaps it's more accurate to say the dialogue simple no longer contains any flirtation/romance).
that being said, it would be dishonest to say there's really much extra content purely for friend paths. while romance is optional, friendship isn't for the most part, so most scenes remain similar, just with dialogue changed to reflect your choices and scenes ending without h-content occurring. there are scenes where, instead of the h-content you would have gotten, there's some minor replacement, but it's kind of rare. there is simply too much that goes into trying to balance 25 potential love interests and their intertwining paths to make alternate content for every possible decision. i went into this game wanting to make sure no one was forced into a relationship with a character they don't like, but it's definitely written and developed with full-harem as its true-canon (or at least harem with the "main girls").
in the future, i'm totally interested in going back and narrowing paths for certain characters and adding more decisive friend or solo-LI chosen path routes, but for the sake of my sanity and to ensure the game is actually able to progress, i have to do it this way xD for example, even if you only rejected ONE love interest in the game, that still creates a ripple of dozens of paths being affected. now multiply that by any other number of potential rejections, and it's nearly an infinite amount of alternate scenes i have to render, write, code, and plan xD as we speak, for example, i'm coding a really long scene with sasha right now, and once i'm done, i get to code it again but specifically for the group of people who may choose to not romance sasha. that group is probably pretty small, so maybe no one will ever see this alternate dialogue. i have to do it just in case, though, to make sure my game doesn't dead-end for anyone, but i don't think it would be a smart use of my time to create an entirely new scene that is specifically for those people who don't want to be romantic with sasha, you know?
at the end of the day, it's my fault for having so many characters! but that's also the main reason i wanted to make this game. i wanted to have what feels like an entire, truly lived-in island with dozens of characters to befriend and romance, and i wanted all of their content to feel natural and flow well. that comes first for me
thanks for asking and checking out the game :)