This has been an incredible week for the entire Hytale team. As we publish this, the Hytale announcement trailer has been viewed more than 11 million times - a number that far exceeds our wildest expectations!

We can't thank the gaming community enough for all of the amazing support we’ve received so far: the tweets, reaction videos, fanart, suggestions, speculation, all of it! We’ve been absolutely blown away by the excitement surrounding the game.

It's been great to receive so much attention from the press, too. Seeing the game covered everywhere from Eurogamer, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, PCGamesN and GameInformer to VentureBeat, Variety, Hollywood Reporter and more has been fantastic for the team after so many years of working on Hytale in secret.

Nonetheless, we understand that with all of this attention comes high expectations. For that reason, we're taking extra steps to ramp up production and ensure that we deliver a game you'll love. For one thing, we're expanding our hiring plans. Keep an eye on our jobs page in the new year for a full list of the positions that we'll be recruiting!

We know that many of you are hungry for more information about Hytale. Starting in early January, we’ll be publishing a series of articles on this blog going into detail about different features of the game, from our world generation tech to the Hytale Model Maker.

In particular, we know that combat, modding and server specifics are important to large parts of the community. We're paying special attention to these topics, and in the new year we're going to be reaching out to community leaders to make sure we're providing you with the information you need. Watch this space!

In the meantime, we want to provide a quick look at something we’ve been working on recently. Amongst all of the excitement of the announcement, we’ve been researching improvements to Hytale’s weather and fog system - and this week we implemented it into the game. These effects weren't finished when we produced the trailer, but here's a glimpse of what Hytale's engine is capable of:

The effects in this video have been drastically turned up in order to best demonstrate their impact. Not every misty winter morning will be quite this misty, but we're really pleased with the effects we're able to achieve with these new features. Of course, modders and content creators will be able to tweak weather and fog settings to their heart's content!

Make sure you watch that video with sound on, too, or you’ll miss out on a preview of Hytale’s atmospheric soundtrack.

This is only a glimpse of a small aspect of the game, but we hope you’ll join us in the new year for much more Hytale content. In the meantime -

Happy holidays, everyone!