How a Two-Person Indie Team Reached 50,000 Steam Wishlists Without a Publisher

With Luminary Creator and Refractive Entertainment Founder Keith Kolod

You decide to make an open-world action RPG with character creation, co-op, climbing, swimming, gliding, combat, crafting, town rebuilding, and several fantasy races.

Then you look around the studio.

There are only two people.

Welcome to indie game development.

That is the reality behind Luminary, an upcoming open-world action RPG from Refractive Entertainment. The game combines exploration, melee combat, ranged weapons, magic, character progression, town rebuilding, and online co-op.

Luminary is heading into Steam Early Access in August 2026. For small teams, game development PC projects like this require careful scope management, especially when a game combines open-world exploration, combat, character progression, and online co-op. The team has no publisher and has never had one huge viral moment. Still, the game has reached more than 50,000 Steam wishlists and attracted coverage from gaming media in several countries.

We spoke with Keith Kolod about how two people manage a game of this size, what actually helped them build an audience, and which parts of their progress came from planning, persistence, or pure luck.

Main topics

• ndie Game Development
• Steam Wishlists
• Indie Game Marketing
• Community Building
• Scope Management
• Steam Early Access

Interview

Q: Luminary is an ambitious game even for a much larger studio. How do two people divide the work, and what does a normal development week look like for you?

A: So Matt and I have worked together for over a decade. I was his Lead when we worked together in Hollywood as VFX artists, and then I hired him onto my company.

We’ve had many years tackling big projects for clients together, and the way we have always done things is I handle the Visuals and Design, he handles the coding and compiling everything together.

As he crunches away on thousands of lines of code that would make my brain explode, I get to sit back and make pretty pictures haha.

This is truly why we have worked so well together for so many years, our skillsets are on very different sides of the work that needs to get done. While he makes things work, I can decide

“how” they should work and what it should look like, so that our old clients (and new players) are happy with the overall experience.

As far as what gets attention first, it all depends on how close you are to release. Very early on for the Steam Page stuff you work a lot on the visuals first, you gotta show people WHY they want your game.

Then we focused on getting it all to properly work in practice (gameplay) which was no easy feat.

We are making something with features not many games even have. Progression saved to the character that can drop in and out of other sessions with complete player hosted co-op This is usually a double or AAA level of experience, that we have just had to figure out how to do on our own.

We tested the waters with public gameplay when we released our demo, and while we never dropped below 80% positive, we learned a lot about our blind spots. Using the community’s feedback helped us make Luminary a better game. From there we just tackle the problem of the day, chipping away at the mountain of work.

You can talk about who handles which parts of development, how your responsibilities have changed over time, how you decide what needs attention first, and where you still need outside help.

Q: You reached more than 50,000 Steam wishlists without a publisher or one huge viral moment. What were the main stages of that growth?

A: Steam and X (twitter), and that’s really it. I tried and failed miserably at youtube, tiktok, instagram, and was basically ran out of reddit with pitchforks haha.

Steam does wonders for getting you shown to players early on. Make that Store Page shine, because the day you set it public will be the biggest push the Steam algorithm seems to give you.

That got us our initial 10k wishlists years ago, but after that it’s been continued hard work.

Anyone who knows me from my X account has seen how I do things on there. I’ve been told my level of engagement with our fans is not normal, but I can’t help myself! I love talking to everyone.

It really is a full time job on top of the other game dev stuff I gotta do, but when you are an indie dev you have to be willing to be your own marketing team as well.

Releasing our demo in Steam’s Next Fest was our biggest spike, 5k wishlists in a few days, and then by complete luck some news outlets saw posts of mine they liked, and talked about our game. I didn’t reach out to anyone, I figured they probably get bombarded with indie devs trying to get their attention all the time. I just posted my own video clips on X, hoping people would eventually see them, and after years they finally did.

Even some bigger content creators follow me on X now. No one has made any content on us yet, maybe someday, but they must at least like what they see from me so far. The day Asmongold followed me I just about had a heart attack!

You can talk about how the first players discovered Luminary, what role the demo played, which events or posts created noticeable spikes, and how the audience changed as more people found the game.

Q: Indie developers hear endless advice about posting every day, contacting journalists, building a community, and trying to please the algorithm. What genuinely worked for Luminary, and what did not?

A: I’m a firm believer that you can make the best game in the world, that no one knows exists. A game can go viral out of nowhere, but someone still shared clips of it to make that happen.

Very early on I started showing clips of our progress on Luminary, but I don’t believe you should do it daily. I’ve seen it before, even in myself.

I’ll follow a cool game dev on X, but after a while you’ll see the same post from them over and over, and subconsciously I find myself not “liking/reposting” it.

So I decided early on I was going to try my best not to annoy people. I never DM’d anyone who didn’t follow me first.

People should be excited any time they see a new post pop up from you, because they know you are going to be showing something cool. So I only do one big post early in the week, and one middle of the road one later.

Even If I tried to do more, the X algorithm really only seemed to allow one of my posts to be a big one (50-100k views), so if that was the case, why try to do more?

But I’m always in replies and comments throughout the week. I also make those posts the same time and day. Tuesday at 11am cst, and Thursday 11am.

After that it’s ALL about community building. Do people like you? Do they want to support you? As an Indie Dev you have the unique opportunity to be personal with your audience, something a AAA corporation can’t do.

Lean into that. Don’t burn bridges, don’t get into internet drama. You are there to sell yourself as well as your game.

You can talk about things you expected to work but did not, unexpected sources of attention, the role of press coverage in different countries, and what you would spend less time on if you started again.

Q: A two-person team cannot build every feature at once. How do you decide what must be created internally, what can be bought or adapted, and what needs to be simplified or removed before Early Access?

A: Correct. You are going to want to lean into the things that not only you can do personally well, but that you can do fast. We are making a game, time is money, so don’t waste you time or money!

You don’t have to box model every single asset like the old way. If you need a rock asset, or a bush, just go get one from an asset pack, but then make it fit your game.

You have a grand vision for your game, make everything fit that. Redo the textures, materials, add something to it. But if you stick to buying non important environmental assets, you’re usually good.

I made sure that I hand made all of the important things, characters, goblins, and if I used modular assets for buildings or structures and I kitbashed them to look unique.

I hand placed every single asset in the map, hand sculpted the landscape shape and painted textures. I don’t like the look of procedural games, I can always tell. I want to be able to tell a story with every little area in the world.

Coming from films where we had to always work fast, it wasn’t about the individual asset, it was about the composition of the full scene. That’s how I work, I look at the big picture, and what the overall experience of the player is going to be.

There’s multiple things we’ve had to simplify in scope in Luminary as we keep to a deadline, but fortunately we designed Luminary from the beginning knowing what we could handle at our level. Design within you means. And fortunately since we will be in Early Access, if we have a successful launch, there will be plenty of time to add those things back in, especially if we can hire on additional people.

You can talk about asset packs, scope cuts, visual consistency, production shortcuts, features that became larger than expected, and how you protect the main idea of the game while working with limited time and resources.

For Indie Developers

What is one practical lesson you would give to a small indie team trying to build an audience before release?

Never let a hater bother you, instead use it as an opportunity to not change their mind, but the mind of the person who might look at their nasty comment and how you handled it. Apparently being kind to people, and moderately funny, is uncommon on Social media haha. I’ve honestly just been myself, and have been told by multiple people that my personality is the reason they dove so headfirst into Luminary super fandom.

You can talk about the one thing teams should start doing early, what they usually underestimate, or what matters more than chasing a single viral moment.

For First-Time Founders

What do you wish you had understood before building your own game studio and taking responsibility for the entire project?

Everything will ALWAYS take longer than you expect. When I lost my client work 1.5 years ago, rather than get another job, I had decided to go full time into Luminary to finally get it to the finish line (or starting line of Early Access).

I had enough savings to do that for a year, and built my scope around that. Well cut to 6 months “passed” when I thought I’d be ready to release haha.

But you can’t give up. To be an entrepreneur you have to be willing to risk it all. There was no way I was ever going to get Luminary to where it needed to be working on it part time, it’s just too big of a game for that.

Be honest with yourself, are you willing to not bring in a single paycheck for possibly years, banking on one potential payday that for 99% of devs it doesn’t work out?

We are still too early to know if we will be a huge success, just be able to keep development going, or go bankrupt, all are future possibilities. Oooph when you put it that way, I don’t know why anyone would be an Indie Dev, but with all that said, the journey has still be amazing.

You can talk about time, money, scope, marketing, decision-making, or the difference between working on someone else’s production and carrying your own game to releas