Paradigm was inspired by Patterns II, a Sid Sackson game which appeared in his book A Gamut of Games. (He called it Patterns II because the name Patterns had already been used by an earlier game in the book.) In Patterns II, a pattern-designer uses paper-and-pencil to draw a 6x6 pattern using a mix of four symbols. As a player, you have your own sheet of paper with an empty 6x6 grid. At any speed you like, you mark a few spaces that you want to view and pass your paper to the pattern-designer, who fills in the correct symbol and passes it back. At some point, you decide to stop viewing spaces and instead try to fill in the rest of the pattern yourself. The pattern-designer gives you a point for every correct symbol you guessed and a negative point for every mistake. There are some extra complexities to the scoring (including a way to give the pattern-designer a score), but that's the basic jist of the game.
I always loved this idea, but I wasn't too excited by the implementation. I felt that colors would be more attractive than symbols, and that other types of patterns besides square-grids would be fun to explore. These things are possible with Patterns II, but are logistically more difficult. For color-patterns, each player would need a set of colored pens or pencils, and for more complex pattern-frameworks, the pattern-designer would need to draw the empty framework for each player.
More importantly, Patterns II isn't really a multiplayer game; it's a solitaire puzzle with scoring. Players don't need to be in the same room while playing; in fact, they don't even need to play on the same day. I set out to design a game like Patterns II which could be played as a true multiplayer game, with all players gathered around the same unfolding pattern.
I initially designed Paradigm as a tabletop boardgame. The pattern-designer would set up a pattern of face-down colored discs, and the players would gradually flip them up as the game progressed. I loved the tactile experience of playing the game with physical tiles, but it was difficult to design good patterns on-the-fly, and they took too long to set up. After I finally settled on a rule-set that I liked (which took a couple of years!), I decided to take the plunge and implement a computer version of the game. Here it is!