Hey everyone! Dirk the Red Panda here was a long-awaited announcement. Version 3.0 will be released within the next 14 days! (within the next 7 days for Patrons)

As you all may know, I have been taking a while to produce this latest update. The general theme for this release has been a creative rut. I will break this rut into three prongs: dialogue, music, and volleyball scenes / games.

In terms of dialogue, I had the outline for this version (and update 3.1) fully written by the start of February, but it has taken me a few of months to fully materialize the dialogue within each of these outlined points of the story. While I had a decent pace during February and some of March, I dropped off during April when I had to start writing some music and volleyball scenes. Fortunately, this May has given me spurts of creative energy (albeit sporadic) to pull through. In the future, if I think of dialogue for a scene out of chronological order, I will write it outside of Ren'Py, and put it in once the scene comes into play.

For the music, I was still finding the direction for the game's overall sound, and the sound for the world's song contest. Since the latter would be much harder to nail, I reached out on the Furry VN Discord, and asked if anyone would be willing to help out with the song contest music. I managed to snag an amazing composer, Camazule (welcome aboard!), who has helped develop a couple songs already for various scenes. My first composer, CRT_SpaceCat, is still on-board for the project, but he will be more occasional in his participation and focus more-so on the background music / overall sound. This aspect is still a work in progress, and kinks will be worked out in the months to come.

Then, for the volleyball games, I really struggled with producing the visual maps in a timely fashion. They took ages to code and write, and I would only get three or four points out a week's work. (Keep in mind, I still have school and work on top of this.)  After some thought on it, I will likely cut back on the number of rallies (or points) that I map, and rely more on dialogue-based descriptions, sprite visuals, and sound effects, for the remaining parts I write. Throughout these games though, I will still keep the volleyball scoreboard screen present, even if a point is not being described via volleyball map.

And finally, I want to think all my VN friends, especially Redd, for helping me through my creative rut and giving me kind words and advice to help me better myself as a writer and person overall. I am so fortunate to have met these creators and for them to console me when I was feeling out of it. I am excited to see what y'all have to think, after such a long wait! More details about what's in it will be revealed in the next announcement.