An Angel is the Lion: all heart. A VC is the Tin Man. Cold and calculated.
Vancouver was cooking. Carina Kom’s laptop quit about seven minutes in, her camera died, and she still delivered her pitch in masterclass style. Which is, if you squint at it, the most honest possible demonstration of the subject. The room you get is never quite the room you prepared for.
Who Was Running the Room
Simply Sweet Games was founded in 2023 and builds premium-casual word and puzzle games for players the mainstream skips past. Their debut title, Criss Cross Castle, has been in soft launch on mobile since last summer.
Tina Merry is CEO. Fourteen years at Electronic Arts as a Senior Development Director, 25-plus AAA titles to market, and later EA’s worldwide Core QA organisation. She has also sat on the other side of the table, evaluating for Creative Europe and judging for the Canada Media Fund.
Carina Kom is Chief Product Officer, with production credits on Battlefield 2042 and Halo: Infinite and more than 800 developers mentored through Diversity in Games. She is also, by her own cheerful admission, a comedian, which explains the Wizard of Oz material later.
It’s Like Scrabble Meets Adventure
The session opened with a question instead of a slide. What kind of pitch did you actually come here to learn? The room said: a game pitch. Contractor work. Fund applications, CMF specifically. Pitching yourself for a job. Tina added awards and work-for-hire services. Carina’s point was that you pitch just by walking a conference floor.
Then the compression tool. Her favourite framework is also the smallest on offer, the X-meets-Y statement. Simply Sweet’s is “it’s like Scrabble meets Adventure” for an investor who doesn’t play games, and “Scrabble meets Slay the Spire” for a publisher who does. Same game, different vocabulary, both under four seconds.
Why bother compressing? Because the clock is never yours. At an angel summit in Prince George the two of them were told three minutes, then ten, then five, same audience each time. Carina turned up at a separate competition prepared for three minutes and was handed ninety seconds at the door. She won pitch of the night.
Turn the Objection Into an Aspiration
Two kinds of questions wait at the end of a pitch, and only one is fun. Tina calls the bad one an objection question. Why is your timeline so long. How will you protect our marketing budget. The aspirational version of that same curiosity sounds like how big could this get, or what would you do with thirty thousand for marketing.
Worth knowing, and they were blunt about it: women get asked objection questions considerably more often than men, and they have watched it happen to themselves.
The fix isn’t to argue. In the Northern Innovation Network finals, with a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollar prize on the table, Tina was asked how she would mitigate failure. Broad, vague, faintly insulting. She didn’t blink, and Carina reckons her answer set the tone for every finalist who followed.
Failure's not an option, but let me tell you what I'm going to do with this amount of money to achieve success.
Always Leave an Ask on the Table
Carina said please five times in a row about exactly one thing. Have an ask.
It doesn’t have to be money. Not ready for funding? Ask to stay on the newsletter. Ask for a meeting in six months, for playtesters, for an introduction to a technical director. A publisher who can’t write you a cheque can very often make an introduction, and frequently will, but only if you name it.
If you do not ask for something at the end of your story, then that was a great meeting, but there will be no follow-up.
When the ask is money, tie it to what happens next. Not “we need a million dollars” but a million dollars to move a prototype into production and land ten thousand installs on day one. Then make the next step embarrassingly easy to agree to. And if the answer is going to be no, go and get the no quickly rather than chasing six warm maybes for nine months.
Angels Have Heart. Funds Have Arithmetic.
Carina’s mental model for the money side is The Wizard of Oz. An Angel is the Lion: all heart, courageous enough to back founders they may never see a return from. A VC is the Tin Man. Cold, calculating, hunting the one deal in twenty or thirty that pays back a hundred times, because that is the only arithmetic a fund has. Angels write ten to a hundred thousand. VCs start around a million.
So her question for any VC is worth stealing. How old is the fund? Eight years into a ten-year fund, against your three-year roadmap, is not going to work out, and better to learn that in the meeting.
Publishers got their own reality check. Plenty no longer fund development at all, only publishing: QA, localisation, marketing, distribution. Carina has seen deals where the publisher takes eighty to a hundred percent of revenue. She now steers most developers toward self-publishing, and if you do go looking, bring a strong prototype, a real team, a roadmap, and a clear idea of what you need.
Things to Keep in Mind
Write your story before you open PowerPoint. Placeholder content first, pretty last.
Record yourself with PowerPoint’s slide-by-slide feature, then listen back on a walk.
Practice from the middle. Start at slide four, jump to slide eight, and carry one cue card with your beats rather than your script.
Pick comparables you can stand next to. Your shooter is not Battlefield.
Frame mechanics as player moments rather than a feature list, then tag them with analytics so you have data to talk about later.
Strip the jargon when the room isn’t a gaming room. No RPG, no NPC, no roguelike.
Check what a publisher actually offers before you court one for a year.
Ask for advice when you can’t ask for money. Tina says it has a habit of turning into money.
What’s the Next Step
Nineteen people came out for this one, and an early show of hands told the real story. A couple had pitched a publisher. Two had pitched an angel. A few had gone at CMF. And a decent number had never pitched anything to anybody. Carina’s response to that last group was the best line of the night: you’re in the room, and that counts.
Most developers learn this by doing it badly on the opportunity that mattered most. An evening with two founders who have written pitches, scored them, and lost a few, closes that gap faster than a year of guessing. You can find this Level-Up Talk session material up on our OGDA member portal.
September 3rd: Clara Smith
Our next Level Up Talk is technical sound implementation.
It pairs neatly with July’s session. James Watkins covered what a score is supposed to do to a player, and the theory sitting underneath sound design. Clara takes the other half: getting into the engine and walking the technical steps that actually produce the score or the sound you had in your head. If you read that recap wondering how any of it gets built, this is your follow-up.
Details go up on ogda.ca and in the OGDA Discord.