Today at the GDC Europe in Cologne German social game developer wooga has officially launched its sixth game Magic Land on Facebook. During his keynote at the conference wooga CEO Jens Begemann surprised the audience by launching the game “now”. More details on the Magic Land were followed up by wooga Head of Studio Henric Suonnen at his talk about the GDC a little a little later.  Magic Land is a mix of established social gameplay and role play adventure elements. In Magic Land the player leads his knight avatar through several adventures while building up and maintaining a kingdom. The initial mission is to free the king’s children who have been kidnapped by a dragon. The game loop of Magic Land consists of building houses and supplying them with harvested crops. At the first glance the design strongly reminds of Zelda and the story of getting back prince & princess from the dragon has a certain Super Mario element to it. It is great to see wooga trying something new instead of bringing out an optimized version of proven hit genres.

We are also looking forward to the full HTML5 verion of Magic Land that will be available in a few weeks. Although it will not be as rich as the desktop version the HTML5 version will be fully playable. According to Jens a player that will play the game on both devices will gain certain advantages.  In his keynote speech Jens addressed the eminent changing of the games industry into a mass entertainment market. He elaborated, “Social games will make the games industry the definitive medium for mass entertainment. Even today, many games reach more people on a daily basis than the major television formats. The next step in the evolution will be to increase a player’s identification with the game by increasing the game depth combined with more developed social cooperation, interaction and communication. We are heading in this direction with ‘Magic Land’.”