Last spring, during their senior year at Viewpoint, now-alumni Max Allison ’25, Shawn Ching ’25, Chloe Ramirez ’25, and Julian Dans ’25 took a different approach for their World Literature Honors assignment. Instead of turning in a traditional essay, they built an entire video game from scratch, drawing inspiration from Dante Alighieri’s poem Inferno.

This wasn’t Max’s first time designing a game. Earlier in the year, he had created one for another English project and was eager to take on an even bigger challenge for his final assignment.

“At the start, I wasn’t planning on making a whole team,” Max said. “But it became clear it would be too hard to make the game on my own, so I started recruiting people.”

With a clear vision for the project and who could help bring it to life, Max brought in Shawn to lead coding and game mechanics, Chloe to create the visual art and animations, and Julian to compose the original music and handle sound design.

“It was definitely the most complex game I’ve ever worked on,” Shawn said. “We were troubleshooting things constantly, but it was so satisfying to see it actually work.”

Set in a pixel-art underworld, the game follows a lost soul through the Nine Circles of Hell. Players solve puzzles and face enemies that represent sins like greed and anger, while encountering characters from the original poem.

“It was super fun working on this,” Chloe said. “I was able to really push my creativity with the art and animation. Each level had a different tone, and I tried to match that with the visuals.”

“I wanted the music to match the intensity of each level,” Julian said. “Some of the circles are more chaotic, others are slower and sadder, so I experimented with different tempos and instruments.”

While the four alumni are now heading to different parts of the country to begin their college journeys, each expressed interest in continuing to collaborate on creative projects.

“We’re calling ourselves ‘Milkfruit Studios,’” Max said. “We want to keep making games together, even if it’s just for fun.”

Congratulations to Max, Shawn, Chloe, and Julian. We can’t wait to see what Milkfruit Studios creates next! Bullet Inferno is now available to play on Steam here.