This is the difference between reiterative design and divergence.
Say you're working on your latest game - its comes together, it works, but you keep wanting to make it better. Refining it. You add, subtract, change, modify different elements but the game, as a whole, is relatively the same. This is reiterative design.
Now take the theme and the overall design goals from above, but now you make a completely different game type. Maybe your first game was a tile-placement area control game and your new divergent game is a deckbuilding card game.
You've come up with two games with the same theme and goals, but is presented in two completely different ways.
When I think back to one of the first designs Matt and I worked on together... Man, that thing had so many divergences but was ultimately put on the back burner. For the sake of a laugh, here is one of the images that was shared between us to explain some of the game components.
The working title was Cave Monster, and it was an adventure/exploration game (ala Munchkin Quest, yikes) based around the cave systems underneath Kentucky. You can probably imagine where the original idea was heading - you're stuck in a cave, find items to help you survive, get out before the monster eats your face! Yeah, riveting, I know. Who wouldn't want to play that?
Well, we didn't. That's why we scrapped it.
The game started in that format and over the course of a month or so, it turned into many different games. We liked the idea of working with the cave systems, but we didn't like the type of game we were making - so we diverged.
It went from an exploration game, to a hybrid-set collection type game, where you are presented with a Monster and you need to figure out how to defeat him. There was some dice involved, rolling, still needed to navigate through caves (we were never really clear on how that worked), but it was sort of a Elder Sign Lite mashed up with Munchkin Quest now .... yikes. We spent some time working on this cause we liked it a bit better, and we wanted to see if we could reiterate enough to turn it into its own game - we couldn't. Again, we diverged.
The last divergent prototype we worked on before giving up was very different, though, still monsters and caves. But now it was a card game and puzzles were involved. Here is the super vague overview and visual we were working with:
With a starting hand of items, players work their way through the cave rooms in hopes to find better item cards and collect puzzle pieces. Two puzzles are present on the board and completing either one of them will allow players to take a chance at fighting the boss monster. Players do not show which puzzle cards they have in their hand and they may make trades with players to try and collect the right puzzle pieces.
This divergent prototype was probably the most original of the three, but we just never finished up with it. The idea for Double Up hit us and we began working on that. Sometimes you just roll with what's working for you at the time and Cave Monster was not working for us. Maybe we'll get back to it, maybe we won't, but it's a good example of divergence in game design.
This is an example of divergent design that ends up on the back burner, I'm sure you have your own examples of this. Next time, I'll be showing an example of a game that went through many divergences and is currently being developed further.
