Tetris Totems

August 14, 2015

What started out as an attempt to learn Swift quickly turned into a lesson on copying+pasting code from an eBook!

The goal was to recreate a simple Tetris game for iOS, and while the tutorial was informative, it didn’t necessarily teach programming concepts to a beginner. But I’m pretty skilled at cmd+c and cmd+v so I was able to get something running.

However, what struck me as fascinating was just watching was sort of combinations would happen naturally each time I ran the game. The image above is a compilation of different highlights. They look kind of like totem poles to me, and so the name Tetris Totems was born.

I’m actually kind of intrigued by the patterns created here. Automated or computer generated art is fascinating to me – things like Google’s “puppy-slug”/”Deep Dream” algorithm are worth a look if you haven’t seen those cute/nightmarish images.