PostMortem (?)
Well i certainly had a lot of fun last weekend, The theme was so-so, obviously created many similar games (i believe someone posted a list of all the games who’s names started with “island”, but i digress). I personally really liked the theme, if only because if it had been something else i would have never created the game i did. Now if you’ll bear with me, i’d like to share my thoughts about the voting:
It always seems like we get these generic themes (caverns, exploration, islands) and not many people are ever overly happy with them… so how do they win? Here’s my oppinion; other themes such as “continuous motion” are more personal; more likely to get a direct YES or NO. Themes like “islands” are much more open to lots of different genres and mechanics. When you’re going through the list of themes, you’re likely to be “continuous motion? what am i going to do with that? NO, PAG? awesome! YES, Islands? hmm… meh NONE”. and since it doesnt really have that much going against it since it’s so open, it’s mostly going to get a few YESs and mostly NONEs. Other themes will get lower because they already allow the voter to think about their game, most likely resulting in a lack of ideas for a game and a NO.
Now that that’s over with, how about i respond to some comments on my game?
Diet Chugg says …
It would be cool to have a speed adjuster that would allow me to speed up night and day even faster. asides for that I can’t think of anything else to add. Well made game fun to be able to collect power-ups and build your own world.
I understand that you’re wishing that days were longer and nights shorter, unfortunately an adjuster would make things much too easy and imbalance everything!
Mstrp2ez says …
Fun game, i never understood how the underlying system for when you got what tool/weapon tought. The day/night cycle could be a bit shorter aswell. Really liked the intro!
I’ll make sure to shorten the cycles when i mess around with the game some more, as that’s two people now who comment on it, i never really had time for an actual description of how you get items.
Endurion says …
Very interesting idea but somehow it was very hard for me to get into it. I didn’t understand when I earned a new tool (do you need to gather different tiles?)
Also, I have no idea how to fight back actually. I didn’t get the sword and don’t know what to collect for that. A bit more details in the intro would’ve helped a lot.
Yes, each item has different requirements for tiles, another thing on the to-do list: explain items more. Holding SHIFT brings out your sword, there’s a description of each item by mousing over them saying s0, but i realize i never told anyone that 
philomory says …
A clever little game with cute graphics and an amusing intro. Unfortunately, whenever nighttime rolled around and the screen got dark, performance for me dropped precipitously and the CPU spiked, which basically meant that when night approached I had to find a safe spot to stand and not move at all until morning. Which somewhat diminished my enjoyment, but overall it was still a good game. Rather difficult, but eventually you get the hang of it.
Yeah, hopefully i’ll be able to do some optimization of the darkness tiles when i go over the game again, i noticed it lagged quite a bit while programming it but due to the time constraint was forced to leave it be if i wanted to actually have an ending to the game.
localcoder says …
I liked collecting different materials and making things.
When I got to a pirate lair, I killed everyone and nothing happened – I didn’t know what to do from there.
Also, when I got the sword I didn’t know how to use it. I assumed I had to click on the pirates. It was only later that I noticed the tooltip that said to use shift.
Apart from that, I thought this was great. Especially the little lantern.
Yes! somebody commented on the lantern 
once you’ve cleared the pirate cave you’re supposed to go to another island and clear the pirate cave there too. Sorry i didn’t put that in the instructions <_<
Tozy says …
It was hard for me to figure out how to play at first. A tutorial would be great.
Hopefully I’ll be able to input an actual tutorial of sorts, the intro explanations were all i could do within the 48 hours!
So yeah! as you may have noticed, i’ve commented on an updated version of the game. i’m basically taking away everything except graphics and the engine, new story, stuffs, stuffs, and more stuffs that i can’t think of right now. but it should be fun!
While you might be right in terms of people’s thought processes regarding theme selection, I don’t think the available voting data for the first four rounds support your idea.
Each person might vote on a theme in one of three ways: +1, 0, -1. We can look at the votes cast to see what the probabilities were for the different ways to vote for each theme. Islands was not unusually likely to receive a zero vote. The average theme that made it to the final round (discounting PAG) had 0.42, 0.24, and 0.34 for +1, 0, and -1 votes respectively (estimated standard deviation 0.04, 0.03, 0.04). Islands had 0.45, 0.23, 0.32 for +1, 0, and -1 respectively.
If we just pay attention to the first four rounds (for which the data is available), we get the following exceptional themes:
Most likely to receive +1 votes: Outnumbered
Least likely to receive -1 votes: Escape
Most likely to receive 0 votes: Falling
Least likely to receive 0 votes: Dreams
Highest “expected total” (probability of +1 minus probability of -1): Escape
So why did Islands win? Well, I think two things come into play:
1. Luck. Vote probabilities were just not that different between different themes. Escape, Abandoned, Flood, Outnumbered, and Islands all had very similar vote probabilities in the first four rounds. It’s a little tricky to run a rigorous statistical test on them because they weren’t all voted on by the same number of people (more on this in a moment).
2. Round 2 (which was the first round Islands appeared in) was not voted on as often as the other rounds were (about 140 people for Round 2 compared to 190-210 for other rounds). This means a couple things: first, if you were interested in attempting to predict the theme ahead of time (like I was), you had to make sure you didn’t discount Round 2 themes just because they had lower vote totals when they were first voted on. Second, for many people (I would guess around 60 people), the final round was the first time they voted on the themes that appeared in Round 2. I’m not sure what the psychological effect that would have.
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Also, sweet game! Yours was one of my favorites in the compo.