It's disappointing from a pure game-design stance, but it's all in the story you tell about your game (not the game itself or what you can actually build). Also, Investors are like my kids: much more willing to read a graphic novel than a chapter book.

I used to work on a prototyping team. Once internally we agreed we had a good prototype, it was more cost effective to send me to a different contract studio to replace my grey box art with temp art than to just let folks try our mechanics raw.

Trick question: Odysseus is in the room. Polyphemus was saying that there was somebody in the room named nobody, not that the room was empty! 😆

Them: "You must really like Halloween"

Me: <walking in with a cape and a death whistle on a necklace> "What do you mean?"

And yes, Casino Zone is awesome. But the sound of the bugs is burned into my head and playing right now in my subconscious.

Celadon City and the Casino Zone have jointly instilled a primal fear in me both against gambling in general and slot machines specifically.

The apps my kiddo manages to find on the "teacher approved" list in mobile app stores do whatever is opposite of that.

Granted King of Fairies into the Lilting Banshee does seem to work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FIN...

or, in the words of the Nac Mac Feegle:

“Free Men! Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled again!”

That's where I started going for the farthest distance between genres (ie: breadth first).

I still missed a lot of pop, disco, bluegrass, different folk/fusion bands, many variants on metal, &c 😆

Granted: the next problem became "ok, I'm going to give this to you <the product team>. Don't ship it as is."

Then they'd ship it because of crunch.

So, the 2nd trick became knowing what to make good/maintainable and what needed to be hacky.