INFERNO: The Nine Circles started as a joke after seeing a film called "Drag Me to Hell" "what if Dante's Inferno, but it's a Game Boy game" and turned into a full weekend build with its own camera module, platformer physics, and nine actual levels.
Why Dante's Inferno
I wanted a project with a built-in structure I didn't have to invent nine circles of hell map almost too perfectly onto nine progressively harder platformer levels. Limbo as a gentle tutorial, Treachery as the final gauntlet. The source material did the level design for me.
The camera problem
Early builds had the camera locked rigidly to the player, which felt
stiff and made fast platforming sections nauseating. I pulled the camera
logic out into its own camera.js module so I could iterate
on it independently of the game loop.
Two things made the biggest difference:
- Smoothing — the camera lerps toward the player's position instead of snapping, so it settles rather than jerks.
- Shake mechanics — on hits and falls, a decaying random offset gets added to the camera position for a punchy, retro-console feel.
Pulling the camera into its own file was the single best refactor of the whole project every other system got easier to reason about once it wasn't tangled up in render logic.
What's next
I'd like to add a proper boss fight for the final circle (Treachery) and experiment with a chiptune soundtrack. If you want to see the code, the game is playable directly from the case study page.