8-Bit Baseline: The Game

8-Bit Baseline was created as part of 12 Days of Art, a collaborative series with Rich Caldwell, using his aerial photography, primarily top-down shots of tennis courts. Last season, when I collaborated with Rich, I leaned into my visual art, blending my photography with his to create a piece. But this time, I wanted to take a different approach. I’ve been bringing my creative coding more into the public eye, and this felt like the perfect opportunity to push that forward. So instead of contributing as a photographer, I built a fully playable Pong game from scratch, using Rich’s aerial tennis courts as the game environments. It felt like a natural way to merge our skill sets, his photography setting the stage, and my coding bringing it to life as an interactive experience. The game itself stays true to the classic Pong format but introduces a few twists: You can select from seven different courts, toggle the soundtrack on or off, and choose from three difficulty levels that affect how the computer plays and how fast the ball moves. Ball trajectory changes based on where it hits the paddle, adding a layer of control and strategy. There’s also a volley tracker, match point indicators, and all in-game sounds, paddle bounces, scoring, win/loss cues, are generated purely in code using sinusoidal, sawtooth, and triangle wave functions, just like early 8-bit games. The soundtrack is an original track called 8-Bit Game Music by Turpak, which I licensed for this piece.