We thought about a lot of stuff for this theme - because it had endless possibilities, and a lot of our older jam games would fit this too. The first thing that came to our mind was an older jam game we made on a similar theme - called Dante's Inferloop: That was a game about running in a loop till you get the answers right at the end - a genre mashup.

We considered about having something like that (a sequel perhaps?), but pressed on for other possible ideas. There were 3 ideas we zoomed in on:

-> A puzzle platformer about using loops you create on death.

-> A block coding puzzle game where the start blocks always end in a loop, and the challenge is to fix it and get the desired end goal.

-> A game which somehow involves this very cool looking satellite loop thing my art dude drew up.

After a lot of discussion (well, not really, it's just 2 of us) - while we liked the 2nd one, we had doubts on how feasible it was in the time frame. We really really liked the satellite loop structure, and decided to build a game around that. I mean look at it!

So we thought about how we can build around it. We discarded a flat out shooting game - shooters are always a last resort, and we thought along the lines of dual purpose design - how we can use the same mechanic for multiple things. We used it to ensure that the asteroids are BOTH your lifeline and your threat, and the drones you use are used for all of collecting, destroying, and repairing. Add in a hook mechanic to recollect drones and add a resource management angle to it - and voila, we get Satelloop!