This indie dev turned photos of his sleeping wife's face into an RPG boss — and she's in on it

JOJOJOJOsoft — call him JOJO — is making Billy the Hero, an upcoming turn-based RPG where the world's worst criminal wakes up trapped in a teddy bear's body on Hell Island. To populate it with bosses, he needed reference material. He found some in his sleeping wife.

JOJO detailed the whole process in a Reddit post. Step one was what he calls the Stealth Mission: his wife had stayed up late baking, so she was in a deep sleep by morning. He snuck in and photographed her face from multiple angles, stressing one crucial rule — do NOT wake her up. Deep sleep gives that raw, natural look, he explains; if she were awake, she'd pose and try to look pretty, and that's no good for monster material. From there he photo-bashed the face shots into a multi-faced, multi-handed base form, desaturated everything to grayscale, then layered colors back in to shape the lighting and shadows. The textures he overlaid came from raw meat — including what looks like it might be roadkill. Blood, veins, tendons, and fleshy connections finished the job. The result is a genuinely unsettling boss creature.

Billy the Hero has a distinctive art style sitting somewhere between pixel art and cartoon, and a combat system built around math and greed — fitting for a protagonist who embodies all seven deadly sins. JOJO describes the whole photo session as mutual trolling between a loving couple of over 20 years, and his wife is fully aware and apparently an active participant in the bit.

JOJO told Kotaku the whole thing was done in good humor — righteous revenge, essentially, in an ongoing battle of trolling between the two. The Reddit post landed well with the IndieDev community, and it's hard to argue with the results: the boss looks genuinely horrifying, which is exactly the point.