Equinox boss #7 - Billy Bones

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Tue, 11 Aug 2009
Subject: Solstice 2

This is the only picture I've been able to find, online, of the 7th boss from our SNES adventure game Equinox, from about 1992.

Unfortunately this picture doesn't do Billy Bones justice at all, which is a shame as he was my favourite of the eight bosses in the game. He was the skeletal captain of the ghost ship which formed the seventh 'dungeon' in the game, and he sat hunched on the back of his cannon, which rotated about 180 degrees, in several frames of animation.

I had no help with 3D models, so all the frames of his rotation animation were drawn by hand, in the 2D bitmap editor Dpaint. It was an absolute nightmare! The cannon itself wasn't too hard, but Billy Bones was incredibly difficult for me to draw in all these different states of rotation, and I was really pleased with the end result. It probably looks a bit wonky now, compared with a rotating 3D model, which any game would use these days, but back then I thought it looked great.

Sadly the animation frame shown is about the least interesting of them all, with Billy almost completely obscured. I'd love to see him animating again, but I've lost my backups of this guy, and I completely failed to get past the 4th or 5th dungeon last time I tried the play the game on an emulator to grab screenshots. It was a *hard* game!

Tags: pixel art, graphics, boss, character design, skeleton, cannon, pirate, snes

Predecessor post: Equinox boss #6 - (pyramid fella)

View the softography page for Solstice 2 »

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How could I capture billy bones' sprites? I think it'd be cool to have rotating gif of the sprite.

Comment by BoneBloke, added Sat, 22 Sep 2018 11:18:50 GMT

No idea how to capture sprites from the ROM. I'd love a rotating gif too.

Comment by Ste Pickford, added Sat, 22 Sep 2018 13:23:01 GMT