'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Bandit explains Kat's Special.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 228

And that's how Kat's NICE Special worked.

From script to final page, the dialogue gets cut and tweaked a lot. For the fun of it, the vote incentive for TWC will let you see what the original dialogue was for this page.

I can't do a vote incentive for ComicMix's tournament but we've somehow managed to get to Round 3 anyway. Whee!! We're now up against another of my favorite webcomics and a really big name: Girl Genius. It'll be amazing if we could pull it off but it's entirely up to you guys! So go and vote! (They're allowing Twitter logins as well as Facebook now, too!)

34 Comments

Holy craps! NAV beat SMBC!!! Wooo! Congrats Aneeka, and good job everyone!

Round 3- FIGHT!!

So that is how the system works. Very clever.
Reminds me how real life video games have hidden stat changes.
In Halo 3 (or 2) you don’t get all your health back when you get your shields back, you slowly regenerate health. The game doesn’t tell you this in any way though, you think you get full health back when you start to regenerate shields.

And having to pick between NAV and Girl Genius….. don’t make me choose.

Actually, NAV beats Girl Genius for me… simply because the story moves along more quickly. GG has too many full-page “dramatic” spreads for my tastes. I still like it a lot, but the pace does lose my interest sometimes. I know people who only read it once a month, just so they can get a satisfying amount of story per sitting.

Regarding the Special… I’m still not quite seeing how the emotion stats are normally supposed to work… they hype up your attack when you’re “angry”? What does “happiness” normally do? Hero Smiley seemed to make Bandit’s avatar act happy, at least. Unless he was just playing along to broadcast to TENka observers what was happening.

I’d think that Happiness is like an invisible defense modifier. It would make sense, given Anger being an attack modifier.
Maybe even… Special Defense.

Fantastic. That is an awesome special… I just wanna know what special she will use for the actual Game.

no, he is a programmer who wanted to know how it worked. he prolly has a readout on everything XD. or he is like Kleya, and has cybernetics implanted, which is a very real possibility since they worked together once. but that question does bad things for him, as now he has to make up an excuse.

So the Nice special crashed the avatar, and the animation was just there for the lols . . . pretty genius.

Did the Special even have anything to do with it? It sounds like simply being hit while unarmed was what did the happiness damage. The Special was just there to boost Kat’s HP so she’d survive reliably, and to conceal what she was doing, since anyone who realized could have done the same without even needing a Special.

This bug exploitation screams “KAT’S A HACKER”. I hope Kleya has been very careful about not being traceable, because a lot of people now know, and it’s only a matter of time before someone decides they’d be better off without her.

I think the special up’ed the amount of happiness damage. Without the special (but still her exra HP), the attacker would have taken happiness damage but not as much.

there was no set bottom limit, but hex and stuff like that doesn’t have negative values. so what it did is it illegally maxed the happiness I think. which caused the avatar to crash cause it was not a legal action for the avatar to go below 1 happiness or to get an absurdly high pseudo happiness from it. very much an exploit, but not Kat’s fault she is brilliant and observant. nothing wrong with exploiting something not stated as being an illegal act.

Hex has negative values and stuff. They are called ‘signed numbers’.
For simplicity, programmers favor signed integers and signed floats. Too much room for weirdness if you use unsigned and fail to correctly validate your inputs.
I only use unsigned numbers if there’s a requirement and signed numbers can’t be used.

Neat! I actually thought it boosted the stat off the chart and caused the lockup that way. At least that was how I recall the post fight discussion. If Bandit wanted to play it cool he could just say that after his Kat fight (pun intended) he asked one of the Teneka programmers to look at what happened. That is technically true even if he were the programmer in question. That way he won’t out himself as a programmer.

You’re thinking of Hero Smiley. That one works differently (although probably similarly).

Considering Not A Villain is going up against a 3-times Hugo-winning (Graphic Novel category) webcomic…

Well, if you lose to GG, then you lose to the best in the business, and there is NO shame whatsoever in that. (In fact, you have 1/3rd the votes GG has as of the moment I went and voted for NAV–and I love GG–so you actually have a pretty high margin of votes for going up against the best in the business, there.)

You also beat out Schlock Mercenary, which has a HUGE following; it has regularly been Hugo-nominated, so we’ll call that second-best in the business. 😉 Plus Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is no slouch in the webcomic industry, either; it’s been a long-standing institution, so you’ve been seeded against some of the toughest in the business.

In a single-elimination tournament like this…you’re in the 3rd round of 6 possible rounds. You beat the 1st round, which placed you in the top 50%. You beat the 2nd round, which placed you in the top 25%, better than 75% out there. Not A Villain has done very well, which means you can hold your head high at the next Comicon. (Whichever one you attend.)

Win or lose this 3rd round, the real win is that you’re going to get a lot of people reading NAV out of sheer interest. You won the seeding round, you won your way into the 3rd round…and your storytelling skills are what keeps us coming back, week after week. (Plus, I enjoy watching your artistic skills evolve. <3 )

…tl;dr version: You Rawk!

Personally, I would guess that the crowds for both Schlock Mercenary and Girl Genius are larger, but less likly to vote. At least for this contest.

Huh. That makes more sense then my theory.

Ah. Is this the same bug that locked up Mae on the couch?

Now I really have to wonder about Bandit’s motive in explaining all this. Sandra says this is a private server. How much is he counting on that? He’s exposing himself as much as Kleya. Somehow I don’t think his next response should be, “Why, no, ma’am, I’m a TENka operative.”

Which he is. The search for Kleya notwithstanding, if Sandra was set to manage the next game group and her dislike of TENka is known, letting a TENka loyalist create a new Game avatar to be a mole in the new team seems like something Dr. Grace would think of.

And now I’m even more suspicious of The Dude/Brandon.

I think what locks Mae up is the fact Mae is using one hand to do everything and any program to do that would be outrageously complex. and no way to do it right and not reveal just how gifted Kleya is. basically, I think Kleya made a good program with flaws so anybody who looks at it won’t think its her.

and your right that he shouldn’t normally reveal himself as TENka. maybe he has a plan, but its possible he just wanted to show off or something other more base desire that has made donkey’s butts of men since before there were donkey butts :3

Finally…I kinda feel Brandon’s actions speak of self-interest as his core motivation so he may not prove trustworthy. It may be too easy for Dr. Grace to lean on Brandon to make him squeal. So while I don’t think he is spying on Jake for Dr. Grace now…in the future? who knows.

I think Shandra is investigating tekna
I also think she knows Bandit is working with them.
Just from reading this panel

Either that or she knew Kat and Bandit knew each other once and is looking for the deconstruct me leader

Everyone knows Bandit works for Tenka. He programmed the twins, who said they were “legitimized programmed created by a Tenka programmer” (page 28). Also, Sandra is explicitly supporting Kleya because the beat Bandit, “Tenka’s newest player” and then didn’t join them when they tried to blackmail her (page 80).

Sandra doesn’t like Tenka, so if Kleya and Bandit are working together, Sandra probably won’t want to support Kleya anymore since she’s trying to cultivate programmers outside of Tenka’s sphere of influence.

Other than the name of the stat, that’s what I figured. When the tenka people mentioned the emotional stats and said they shouldn’t be able to do that, I knew it had to be exploiting a bug in the code.

Ohhh, right, because he’s not supposed to know about that because he wasn’t supposed to be watching the other matches!

Although, right now he could claim that he talked to the people she defeated and figured it out on her own.

Bandits a girl now? 😛

Um, Bandit had a fight with Kat when he ‘lost’ his regular match from not showing up in time. Kat won, though almost didn’t because Bandits special hit her before her Nice Special was activated. Then bandit stopped attacking and she had to grab him and fall over which injured her and caused nice to hit him locking him up.

What amazes me is that it froze the avatar without screwing anything else up.

The value could have been used as a multiple. Something like speed * .1 * happiness (just assuming that speed is a stat and it was involved). And if happiness is 0, everything would be 0. Of course, this is assuming an unsigned integer. If signed, happiness would have gone into the negatives and that would have been interesting to see.

WOW. even though i’m a fan of GG, i’ve gotta say i’m really hoping that you win. if only because your story has so much more to say than GG imo.

i’m not sure of anyone else, but i’m hoping anyone who knows GG will vote for you instead. they have enough hugo’s atm.

It looks as though 90% (guesstimate) of my fave comics are in the third round! On the downside, about half of them are currently losing. 🙁

Right now, only one of my favorite comics is in the top 16 (A Redtail’s Dream). Not A Villain lost to Girl Genius, but ironically, Girl Genius is losing to aRTD. Quite sad.

Even more sad, I don’t have a Facebook account or a Twitter account (and I don’t need either of them, especially Facebook). Why do we have to pay if we want to vote and we don’t have either of those types of accounts?!?!?

*Ends whining/rambling*

How’s this one doing? Every time I check, I don’t see it’s name on the list

So does this end up working like a morality system? With NPCs reacting to a given player differently based on their Emotional Stats?

that’s a very good question. guess we will find out. if that is a component of the emotional stats…then it will make their future actions far more interesting.

Awkward moment coming in 3…2…

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 228