How big can you make a boss?

[Blacksheep32]

Just trying to get some scope on making boss sprites.

 

[Dirk]

If I recall correctly you are limited to 64 sprites (8x8 pixels) on screen and 8 sprites max per scan line. If you have more than 8 sprites flicker will occur. So if your character is 16x24 pixels you are already using 6 sprites + sprites you might use as projectiles for shooting your enemy.
But you can use a trick and use the background tiles as part of your enemy. I couldn't find it, but someone on the forum made a giant spider and used sprites only for some parts of the spider.

EDIT: Here are two examples from Arielle and Ninja Gaiden 3

 

[iridium_ionizer]

I don't know how Ninja Gaiden 3 got this to work, but notice how both screens have a black background and also Ursula has a lot of solid colors within her.

As per Kasumi (in https://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=10784.msg115062#msg115062 among other places), there are 256 unique background tiles on screen at once while the entire screen is 960 tiles. So only 27% of the current tiles can be unique.

 

[dale_coop]

Using background and only some sprites (monster objects) for the weak parts of the boss.
Like RinRem01 did (ths giant spider boss) in his WIP "Narman: The Arctic Defender":
https://www.facebook.com/groups/NESmakers/permalink/750801935274134/

 

[Dirk]

Yes, that was the game is was thinking of dale_coop, but I couldn't find it ^^