Return to Planet Zoveka

About this game

Latest news

• Announcements·18 Aug 2026Official

  The Pre-Release Demo Is Now Playable!

  The free pre-release demo for Return to Planet Zoveka is now playable on Steam.It is a generous early-to-mid-game slice: herd and merge cosmic dust, expand the family mining operation, unlock upgrades, and start automating. The Dust Rush Challenge Arcade mode is fully playable, too.The demo is still developing, and your input will help guide the road to release. Tell us what is fun, unclear, too slow, or missing—including mechanics, balance, quality-of-life, and accessibility ideas. We cannot promise every suggestion, but we will read them carefully.Share your ideas in Game Suggestions for ImprovementFor technical problems, please use our Bug Reports forum.We’ll update the demo regularly so it continues to reflect the evolving game. We hope you enjoy our slightly strange little space game—and thank you for helping us make Planet Zoveka better.Play the free demo on SteamSee you out among the dust,Invantage Studios
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• Announcements·29 Jul 2026Official

  Celebrating the Artists and Musicians Behind Return to Planet Zoveka

  Creating the world of Return to Planet Zoveka is a collaborative effort, and we have been fortunate to work with a wonderfully talented group of visual artists and musicians.Bringing a game to life takes far more than ideas and code. Its worlds need atmosphere and identity, its characters need personality, and its music needs to capture the emotion and energy of the experience. Skilled artists and musicians transform those individual elements into something players can see, hear, and connect with.It has been a genuine pleasure working with people who bring not only their creative talent, but also their own perspectives and experience to the project. Their contributions are helping us shape the distinctive characters, environments, and sounds of Return to Planet Zoveka.We would like to introduce and celebrate some of the talented people working with us so far:WORLD ARTUmberto TonellaUmberto is a freelance game artist and UI designer from Italy. He works primarily on game environments, concept art, and game UI/UX design for independent studios and developers.ArtStation: artstation.com/umberto_tonellaCHARACTER ARTMartin Ariel FonsecaMartin is a professional digital illustrator and concept artist specialising in illustration and character design.Instagram: ThinArt3Fiverr: ThinartArtStation: ThinArt3MUSICRyan PhillipsMusic producer and DJ.Facebook: @djryanphillipsAndile Charls KgoedInstagram: @its_charles.andileFacebook: @its_charles.andileTikTok: @its_charles.andileAresiaMore details will be provided in later updates.Nneko MoshoeshoeFacebook: @Nneko MoshoeshoeTikTok: @nneko_blacknoteInstagram: @i_am nnekoWe are grateful to every artist and musician contributing their skill and creativity to the game. We look forward to sharing more of their work and introducing more of the people behind Return to Planet Zoveka as development continues.Thank you for following our journey!
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• Announcements·27 Jul 2026Official

  Our Public Demo Is Almost Ready!

  We’re excited to share that the public demo for Return to Planet Zoveka is progressing well and is almost ready!We’re incredibly proud of what we’re putting together, and we can’t wait for you to experience it.Our current target is to make the public pre-release demo available around during August 2026. As we continue with final polishing and testing, this timing may shift slightly.Watch this space for more updates and news as we get closer. We’re excited to welcome you to Planet Zoveka soon!
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• Announcements·6 Jul 2026Official

  Invantage Studios Is Now On YouTube

  Hello from sunny South Africa!We have opened the new Invantage Studios YouTube channel you can find here:This will be our home for regular video updates around Return to Planet Zoveka: gameplay captures, development progress, trailer clips, feature spotlights, and the occasional look behind the scenes as the game keeps growing.If you would like to follow the project in motion, please check in there regularly and subscribe. It helps us a lot at this stage, and it gives us a good place to share more of the game than we can fit into a single Steam post.Thank you for following along, wishlisting, and helping us get this strange little dust-mining space adventure out into the world.See you among the dust, Invantage Studios
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• Announcements·18 Jun 2026Official

  The Fun Part You Don’t See: Optimising Return to Planet Zoveka

  Most players will never notice the quiet little systems running underneath Return to Planet Zoveka, keeping the game fun and smooth.When the game is running well, you should be thinking about space dust mining and surviving the strange little mess we have left for you to solve. You should not be thinking, “Ah yes, excellent memory management.”But we are thinking about it. A lot.At Invantage, we usually spend our days building software, data systems, automations, payment flows, reporting tools, and operational platforms where the boring parts have to work beautifully. A slow process, clumsy handover, or hidden bottleneck can cost real time and real money.When we get to build a game, we bring that same slightly obsessive mindset with us. Only now the “business process” might be 60,000+ real-time physics particles flying around a living game world. And honestly? That is our kind of fun. We are not just asking, “Does it run on our dev PC?” We are asking, “Can it stay smooth when the world gets busy?”We stress-test the simulation beyond normal play conditions, profile frame timing and memory use, and look closely at the spikes that can make a game feel rough even when the average frame rate looks fine. Where it makes sense, we use parallel processing and more data-oriented systems so the main game thread has headroom. Getting parallel jobs optimal and bug-free is a great challenge, and we like it. Keeping our own gameplay loop around the 2 millisecond mark while simulating thousands of physics particles is something we are currently getting right, and that is genuinely exciting. This is one of the areas of development we are most proud of.Our team likes nuts and bolts. We like the weird little problems behind the obvious experience. We like taking something complicated, breaking it into cleaner systems, and making it run better than it probably has any right to. Some people might call it “overengineering” :-)So yes, this is a progress update. But it is also a small love ...
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