Billy the Hero's Wedding Boss Is the Dev's Wife
To marry in Billy the Hero you must beat a ring-guarding boss that solo dev JOJO built from covert photos of his sleeping wife. No AI, all love.
In Billy the Hero, the new dark-fantasy RPG from Thai solo studio JOJOJOJOsoft, the road to a wedding runs straight through a monster built from photos of the developer's real wife, and yes, she is in on the joke. The game has a marriage system, and proposing requires a wedding ring. That ring is guarded by a boss that the developer, who goes by JOJO, built from covert photos of his sleeping wife's face and hands. To get married in the game, you literally have to beat her.
How the boss was made
As Kotaku reports, JOJO laid out his process in a Reddit post, and it is entirely hand-crafted, with no generative AI involved. That is not a boast from a hobbyist: JOJO worked professionally as a movie matte painter, and it shows. He started by taking reference photos while his wife was in deep sleep, reasoning that a sleeping face gives a raw, natural look because an awake subject instinctively poses. From there he photo-bashed the images in Photoshop, cutting and arranging the faces, desaturating everything to grayscale, then relighting with layered color and overlaying raw-meat and food-photo textures. The final pass added the gore: blood, veins, tendons, and fleshy connective bits. The result is a multi-faced creature with hands reaching out of its mouths, and it is the guardian standing between Billy and that wedding ring.
She is not the only meal-based nightmare, either. Another boss is a skeletal horror drawn from the remains of a half-eaten KFC order.
A 20-year love story, not a betrayal
If that sounds like a betrayal, it is the opposite. JOJO told Kotaku his wife is fully aware and an active, willing participant in what he frames as affectionate mutual trolling. She pranks him constantly, he says, including posting unflattering photos of him asleep on Facebook.
"the monster that took me the longest to create... mainly because the relationship took over 20 years to incubate!"
He added, "We are very close and tease each other constantly," and "Turning her into a monster is just me playing catch-up." The couple, he says, are built on mutual trolling and a lot of love.
We love this kind of craft: a solo developer turning 20 years of marriage, a stack of Photoshop layers, and a leftover chicken dinner into something genuinely his own. It is grotesque, it is deeply personal, and it is entirely earned.
Where to get it
Billy the Hero is a turn-based RPG with math-based combat, city management, and multiple endings. Billy himself is the world's worst criminal, an embodiment of the seven deadly sins who wakes with no memory, trapped on Hell Island in the body of a cute teddy bear. The game is listed for Windows PC and single-player, and is marked "Coming soon" with no release date or price yet. You can wishlist it now on its Steam page.