Somewhere, a panel of people you will never meet is reading a funding application and deciding, in about twenty minutes, whether your game gets to exist.
Tina Merry has been on that panel, and Carina Kom has stood in front of such panels numerous times (they recently won the rapid pitch competition at WebSummit 2026). Between them, Tina and Carina have several decades of experience writing pitches, negotiating with investors, all while raising their studio Simply Sweet Games from nothing.
Who’s presenting
Simply Sweet Games was founded in 2023 by Tina and Carina, with a focus of building premium-casual word and puzzle games for players the mainstream skips past. Their first title is Criss Cross Castle, a cozy word puzzle adventure game.
Before the studio, Tina was a Senior Development Director at Electronic Arts, bringing more than 25 AAA titles to market across console, PC, mobile and handheld. She also ran EA’s worldwide Core QA organisation across Romania, the USA and India.
Tina has been an evaluator for the European Commission’s Creative Europe games program (twice), and several times as a juror for the Canada Media Fund. She has also spent fourteen years shipping games at EA, which means she knows exactly how far a pitch can drift from the thing you actually build.
Carina has spent 18+ years shaping player experiences across indie and AAA titles, contributing to globally recognized franchises along the way (like Battlefield 2042 and Halo: Infinite). Their work blends product innovation, player data, and community insight, proving that games can be both commercially successful and deeply human.
A 2025 Business in Vancouver Forty Under 40 recipient and recognized Games Industry Leader, Carina is also a longtime advocate for equity in game development, mentoring and championing underrepresented creators across the industry and illuminating the next generation of talent.
What they’ll cover
Pitching is a translation problem. You know your game from the inside. The person across the table has never played it, has heard nine other pitches this week, and is running a calculation you cannot see: who plays this, what does it cost, and can this team finish it.
Both Tina and Carina will get into what a pitch has to accomplish, where decks lose the room, and how to describe your game to someone who isn’t already in love with it.
Why this one
Almost nobody teaches this. Most developers learn pitching by doing it badly a few times, usually on the opportunities that mattered most.
At our last Level Up Talk in July – James Watkins of WatkinSoundMusic showed us how to build music that reacts to gameplay instead of looping underneath it. You can read that recap here.
If you are planning on attending in person, the doors open at 6:45 pm, Thursday August 6th, at 460 Doyle Avenue in Kelowna.
Ready to level up with Okanagan game developers?