Outside Joke Origins

Before COVID made vanlife cool, we quit our jobs at Amazon and 2K and moved into a 32-foot fifth wheel trailer with our two dogs and two cats. Super normal.

At the time, we toyed with the notion of starting an indie game studio while we lived it up on the road, but besides some prototypes and pixel art, we didn't find the time or drive to make it a reality.

Smash cut to 5 years later. We're normies now: living in a house sans wheels, 3-year-old and 1-year-old daughters, demanding day jobs. The games industry seems to be collapsing all around us, with layoffs, studio closures, and high-profile hundred million dollar failures.

It's 2 AM and Leslee shakes me awake. "I'VE GOT IT." In her dream was a vaguely nostalgic first-person dungeon crawler...with a hand of cards in front of the camera instead of a sword or wand.

And thus, Deckcrawler was born. Many indie devs say they're making their dream game; ours simply came to us in a dream.

It's a first-person roguelike deckbuilder that blends the strategic depth and one-more-run variety of Slay the Spire with the immersive RPG adventure of classic old-school dungeon crawlers (and even more contemporary first-person RPGs in the Bethesda vein).

We've been building it in earnest since mid-2025, and we...think we might be onto something. Friends & family playtests have just begun - if you know us, please drop us a DM; we'd love to watch you play the latest build. Once we're ready (soon!), we'll open it up a playtest with folks we don't already know. You can sign up on this here website.

As for the studio name: after considering a variety of hilarious utterances from our 3-year-old, we landed on "Outside Joke" (after she moodily insisted that something was not, in fact, an inside joke, but an outside joke). It's perfect, because the games we want to make intend to appeal to fans of niches (like, y'know, roguelike deckbuilders), while also (hopefully!) bringing even more people in on what makes them great.

More soon.