A Kelowna-based game studio has announced a pan-Atlantic gaming partnership as Lemonade GameLabs Ltd. entered an agreement with Queen Games GmbH of Troisdorf Germany to operate globally as their development studio division. This partnership brings to Kelowna a publisher with a catalog of over 200 designer games.The first game under development by Lemonade Labs will be an action/adventure style game based on the wildly popular tabletop game “Escape: The Curse of the Temple”. In an interview with Meepletown.com, game designer Kristian Amundsen Østby described some of the challenges in translating a game to an electronic version:
“In all board game conversions it is a challenge to get the user interface to feel natural. But that is particularly important in this project since Escape is such a physical game, one could almost say a dexterity game. The electronic game will of course have game modes that are one-to-one conversions of the board game, but we also want to make full use of the media and make unique game modes that would not be possible to do in a board game.”
“We are pleased to announce a partnership has been formed between Lemonade GameLabs Ltd. and Queen Games gmbh to create the ‘Queen Digital Games’ division in Kelowna, BC,” said Ted Carefoot, CEO of Lemonade GameLabs Ltd (now operating as ‘Queen Digital Games’). ”This partnership brings a recognizable global designer game publisher to Kelowna, further forwarding our holistic goals in increasing the opportunities and transparency for video game and tech industry here in the Okanagan.”
This announcement is yet another example of the growing strength of the gaming industry in the Okanagan. With Disney Online Studios (Club Penguin) and Hyper Hippo (Mech Mice) leading the way, video game studios and industry-related companies continue to thrive in this area. WTFast, a SAAS company that helps make online games up to 70% faster through a proprietary technology & global data network, continues to staff up to support their rapidly growing user base. 2Hat Security, with their PottyMouth Chat Tools, is leading the industry in safe chat tools and have recently signed several new clients.
The gaming industry in the Okanagan is a pretty tight-knit community, and meetups happen regularly. For example, Tuesday morning at 8 am, a collection of artists, producers, developers and entrepreneurs meet at Streaming Cafe in Kelowna.
For Carefoot, the opportunity to grow his company in the Okanagan is one he’s thrilled to take advantage of. “We’ve benefitted greatly from the local community, including Okanagan Community Futures, SIDIT, CDMN soft-landing programs, Accelerate Okanagan, and from the tech community at large. This is a fantastic place to grow a business, and we’re looking forward to adding to this rapidly growing industry.”