"Stuck in a loop" was not one of the better themes of the lot. Luckily, it wasn't one of the worst themes I've faced (e.g, the losing theme You can't save them all, or LD38's A Small World), but it's certainly not ideal. Luckily, I do have a plan going forward - presuming I can get some of the fiddly maths worked out in a reasonable timeframe, I'll be making a game more or less about my constant loop of lost homes in NMS that've all been claimed by various generation resets, because woop that's definitely not an overzealous goal for 72 hours. A small galaxy fulla planets and procedural generation, with actual newtonian physics a-la Kerbal. Though no worlds will ever remain your home long enough to really enjoy on account of the random regeneration-wipes, you'll at least get to have some fun swooping about in actual orbits and the likes.

If getting that working does not happen within a reasonable amount of time, then I'll dump the idea and make a runner about being on a literal loop-de-loop or the likes that's slowly falling apart, because that'll be pretty cheap & easy, maybe even on the level of being doable within the remaining Compo time period.

Best of luck to all the rest of you who're gonna try and stick with the jam in spite of the bad theme. Know this: your struggles are valid, and you are not alone. Every jammer has been here before, and will be again - all you can do is push forwards, and failing that, put your jam time to good use working on another project that's meaningful to you. Even if you hate what you end up making, or simply cannot come up with an idea, don't let that stop you from being productive - I'm assuming my main goal won't actually be doable, but getting the maths working for double-precision floating origin support w/ Newtonian physics will be vastly helpful in one of my other projects, so if the final result is just a tech demo with a single motile planetary system of grey spheres, I'll consider that a personal victory even if it goes Unfinished on the LD site.

• edit note: it was LD38 that was A Small World. there is unfortunately no good way of making a Hugely Unpopular President sequel with Stuck In a Loop, which is a shame