Comic for Friday, January 15th
I spent longer than I care to admit debating if I should use “inches”. Ultimately I decided to use it over some metric unit for three reasons; first, the closest unit that’s actually used in metric to it is centimeter, and “a few centimeters” is a lot different than “a few inches”, and the word itself is longer and less wieldy. Second, they clearly not literally speaking English being that it’s a different country in a different world and all, so I can consider that part of the translation as they are as unlikely to have metric as they are to have Imperial units if you think about it too much. Third, over half our readers are from the United States, so that’s probably going to be the most familiar terminology. I have a suspecion that I’ve used ‘meters’ over ‘feet’ previously, but I couldn’t locate if I did; Meters is clearly better than yards or feet, but I’ve never really found centimeters to work out as well as inches I guess… 😉
… I told you I worry about their weirdest shit in writing this comic…
The first point is complete! I can assure you’ve seen the most normal point we will see here! Probably.
We’ve seen before that at point blank a boosting individual (or at least Naomi) can simply move their body faster than magic can be activated – it’s a similar weakness that mages have to guns at short range. If someone pulls the trigger before they can activate magic, they are just as dead – though the time magic takes is up to the mage. Additionally, she can’t activate her spell until she has an intercept course for the ball, so against the net is dangerous. Lastly, activating a spell closer to someone else is using magic is harder due to mana interference.
Of course, the advantage of magic is versatility and the fact that you don’t have to physically reach the ball – neither of which are well served by simply testing whose faster between your magic and their reflexes directly at the net (which, as noted, is giving the reflexes a direct advantage as well as an indirect one).
… well, that’s enough for my supplemental essay. If you’ve made it to the end, congratulations you get an extra credit star!*
*Extra credit stars are not valid currency.
I will add a poll where you can vote for the character to get the next vote incentive as soon as I figure out how to make a poll that is a) free, b) easy to make, and c) doesn’t collect a creepy amount of data on the voters. Seriously, after a quick Googling I found poll-maker, but as part of the results (visible to everyone) it shows each voters geographical location. That seemed… extremely unnecessary to me 😐 while it was wrong about mine (by a few states perplexingly) it still seemed creepy so I’ll find a plugin or something.
There is now a poll for which character should be the next vote incentive, ignore rant above and scroll down! 😉
Loading ...
“Letting Naomi stay close to the net is a rookie mistake.”
What part of “Kally has never even heard of this game before” would make you think she isn’t a rookie?
“If a player on her level is using only a racquet, you’d have to expect that.”
How is Kally supposed to know what level Naomi plays at?
–
I think the idea of voting about the Voting Incentive is a pretty good one. 🙂
Has Mium told Ila that Naomi is the person who can beat him? She’s watching kind of wide-eyed (and limp-cowlicked), so she seems to be impressed. ^^
Great action poses. Your confidence is increasing. 🙂
I like letting people vote on things, and I think people will be a lot more inclined to do if I make it easy with the poll (rather then making people email me or comment, which is scary apparently!) 😛
I have a suspicion that I will have to remove the winning character each time or something though, as there is a certain character I suspect will win everytime otherwise (…as she’s won almost every time I’ve had a vote… and is currently winning…)
As far what Mium has told Ila… probably. Ila is interested, but I think she’s also got another feeling towards the current situation, that may fit in the with a bit her childish behavior… which is adding a vague pout to the intent observations of the proceedings… 😉
She wants to play the winner? 🙂
Haha, you are good at this 😀 Pretty close… 😉
Knowing how much of her self worth is based on winning, Ila wouldn’t want to play the winner, she’d want to BEAT the winner.
It’s amazing what sorts of weird stuff you have to think of when writing. I’ve got a TXT file around here somewhere with the complete Imperial system of measurements (including all the things like furlongs and chains that usually get left out of the explanation), but tweaked just a little so they’re more compatible with base 12 math. It didn’t take much, actually.
Haha, you know, I’m actually pretty okay with base 12 for measuring things, in a lot of ways it’s better than base 10 – it’s just frustrating that Imperial doesn’t follow it after it starts out promising…!
I’m in favor of your version – you should submit it to …. whoever determines these things. If we are going to keep using Imperial we may as well fix it 😀
Yeah, the imperial system loses the base 12 bit with the chain (22 yards), the furlong (10 chains), and mile (8 furlongs). Changing those to 24, 9, and 9 makes things a bit easier.
I just wish there were a real imperial unit smaller than an inch. There’s only the thou, which is a metric addition (1/1000 of an inch).
bt = base 12 foot bty = base 12 yards
12 inches to the foot 1 foot (1/3 yard)
3 feet to the yard 3 feet (1 yard)
24 yards to the chain 72 feet/ 60bt (24 yards/ 20 bty)
9 chains to the furlong 648 feet/ 460bt (216 yards/ 160 bty)
9 furlongs to the mile 5,832 feet/ 3460bt (1,944 yards/ 1160 bty)
3 miles to the league 17,496 feet/ A160bt (5,832 yards/ 3460 bty)
The conversion math is certainly harder then metric, but it’d be pretty easy to use as discrete units. Of course, many of those are pretty depreciated – I think if you told someone you ‘ran 3 furlongs’ they’d give you a pretty weird look! At least with metric all the ones that aren’t used (like decameter) are fairly obvious, which is a naming scheme advantage if not a divisibility advantage…
Typically for nuts and bolts and stuff in imperial they use fractions like (eighth or sixteenth) but I agree it’s pretty unwieldy for casual use, and one of the reasons that science terms which go so much small always drop into metric just naturally.
The action in panels 4-7 is a bit unclear; did Naomi play the ball off the wall behind her?
Haha it is rather unclear. I don’t think I picked good angles but you’ll have to forgive me in that it’s a bit of a new experience here 😀
When in panel 1 she was turning to her right with the swing – so Kally reflected the ball from right across the net behind her into a typically blind spot but she just completed the turn and hit the ball behind her pretty much straight down.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but it turns out it all depends on the quality of the picture in question, does it? 😛
Oh, I see the problem; those aren’t panel boundaries, they’re the top of the “net”. If it’s not too much trouble, you might want to make the panel boundaries a different shade?
Haha, yes, that’s been a bit of a reoccurring problem for me.
Anyone can feel free to chip in on this, but what’s the general feeling about that page compared to something a little more webcomic industry standard like this. [Link]
Originally I had the panels surrounded by dark grey – at some point I switched from that to white between panels, but people thought that was confusing at some points, so I added the outline, but we have major tangent problems like you’re noticing here due to this design.
Should I go back to black-backdrops? Thoughts?
Black is pretty stark. I’d say any color that doesn’t get confused with something in the panels would be fine. You could even change it from time to time if you get bored.
Other colors are a little troublesome because they you have to change them every time you use that color as the background to one of the panels (where I almost never use pure black).
I agree it’s a little stark, probably why I used dark grey originally (though it ended up bleeding with the panels way too much since I make tons of stuff dark grey… 😉 )
A probably better approach is to integrate the backdrop with the larger panels and make it part of the scene, but my ‘backgrounds skill’ isn’t that high yet, needs another year or so of level grinding to get there and not look like chaos himself vomited onto the page.
I think for the time being I’ll stick to being indecisive between my current approach and black, but welcome more thoughts. I think if I’m careful to avoid hard tangent lines it wouldn’t be bad, but see previous thoughts on background planning skill set 😛 Usually I sort of plan how to show the characters then draw the background to fit, don’t have the mental-multi-variable processing to get good angles on the characters AND backgrounds yet… 😀
You could try not using any thin white panel-spanning objects in the comic itself.
Haha – that’s the solution I tell myself I will use usually, but sometimes get into pickles like this one. When I first drew the net I was able to use angles where it wasn’t a problem, but getting here I’d have to either change it or discard the angle I would otherwise use.
I think it’ll be a little better moving forward, trying some ideas, mostly focused on using less overt linework for scene objects since it doesn’t usually look great anyway with a little more weight on panel borders and some background gradient tweaks.
I actually did a small post-process edit just now since I agree with you – maybe it’s a little more clear. To be honest ‘fixing’ pages is usually out of scope (there is something I would like to change in almost all of them!) but maybe that tweak makes a little more clear 😉
There is a poll! Vote for the character that should be the next vote incentive! It’ll go up this weekend (poll closes Saturday morning). It’s at the bottom of the page!
If you vote Other! Put your vote as a reply in answer to this comment.
Poll for next vote incentive is now complete (as I need to start drawing it soon!)
Unsurprisingly, Naomi won. Top four were:
Naomi (39%, 11 Votes)
Ila (21%, 6 Votes)
Kally (14%, 4 Votes)
Mione (14%, 4 Votes)
We actually got more votes then I expected, and Ila fared far better then expected; Mione was an unexpected dark horse candidate it seems – coming in 3rd (tied) is a pretty major surprise.
Naomi will be the next vote incentive, but to prevent just drawing the same character over and over, I will either do the next vote incentives in order on this poll, or do another poll without her for the next one (just to be fair, as she usually seems to win – historically when I let stream viewers vote, she always won that too somehow 😐 )
Aww I missed the poll -.- Doesn’t look like my vote would have mattered though o.o