I may seem a bit picky, but I don't consider things like a specific game genre or type of game (like 2D, 2.5D isometric, Tower Defense, etc) to be a good theme. I also don't really care for things like "Only X Button(s)", or "You are the _". I see Only 1 Button submitted every year. I'm old enough I remember playing a lot of Atari 2600 when I was very young, the iconic joystick with a single red button. The technology has come so far since the early 80's, why limit your creativity that way? :smile:

I try to look for things that I think could be interpreted multiple different ways by different people so everyone doesn't make the same game. I saw quite a bit of variation way back in LD42 for "Running out of Space", but even then there were quite a few people who took the theme very literal and made some type of endless runner game where you were in space. After playing 10-20 of those during the voting round, you start to wish there was more room for interpretation of the theme.

All that being said, I also normally try to not vote for duplicates, so if there were 12 copies of something I DID think was a good theme, I probably only upvoted it once or twice, not all 12 times. Maybe that's the wrong way to do it, but that's what I personally do.

We won't talk about the ones that were flagged as being inappropriate or offensive, as they probably know what they were doing and we don't feed the trolls any more than needed around here :wink:

With that out of the way, here's how I fared for the slaughter round this year: