Stardew Valley 10-year Anniversary Video (Retrospective & New Spouse Reveal)

Hey guys, it's me ConcernedApe, creator of Stardew Valley. Today is the 10 year anniversary of Stardew Valley. So to commemorate this special milestone, I put together this video which shows off some old builds of the game, has some of my commentary about the development timeline, and highlights the various updates over the years and how Stardew Valley has changed over time. So I hope you find it interesting and here we go.

Sprout Valley 2012. So this was the original name of Stardew Valley. It was called Sprout Valley, which is an awful name. That's why I eventually changed it. But this was probably about six months into development. I had a functioning game, but it was very rudimentary, and I would say much more similar to the Super Nintendo Harvest Moon game

than Stardew Valley is today. Of course, I grew up playing Harvest Moon game than Stardew Valley is today. Of course I grew up playing Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo and so I was heavily inspired by it and you know my first target you might say for this game was to essentially emulate Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo. That was my starting point and then I wanted to expand a bit from there. As you can see the pixel art basically looks like crap but there are some things like the bus there that essentially made it into Stardew Valley. The basic design was there even six months into

development and you know Stardew Valley took four and a half years to release 1.0. So we can watch this for a little bit. You'll notice how it looks similar to Pelican Town. Some things are basically unchanged, but then other things are quite odd. Pierre's got his daily wallpaper and flooring on display. Those portraits are kind of hideous. Sometimes I wonder, you know, if I had just released this game after six months, where would I be right now?

Somehow I don't think that the game would have taken off.

So...

Ugh, look at Clint. But you know, this was like a part of essentially a training process for me. It was my education on being a game developer. I do think there's something special about the naive perspective of a beginner.

It's untarnished, it's fresh, it's primal. And you can't really recapture that once you have experience. There's the original Gunther. Green hair in the sprite, brown hair in the portrait.

I don't know what I was thinking.

The character movement speed is insane. I'm sure you guys would love that in Stardew Valley. I'll have to get you on Way of the Wind part 100. Alright, let's show you the old mines real quick. The mines are one of the areas of Stardew that have gone under a lot of changes, probably the most changes of any, at least, gameplay element. However, some concepts have been there from the beginning, like slimes. Slimes have always been there. Ladders down have always been there in one way or another. I guess I hadn't discovered the concept of knockback yet. The death sound has always been there. Alright, well I think that's enough for Sprout Valley. So let's go ahead and jump to the next

earliest build that I have. So here we have a build from 2013. I've probably been working on Stardew for maybe a little over a year at this point and it's radically different from that previous build that I showed you.

We're actually starting to see some things that look like Stardew Valley here. And I think at this point I was calling it Stardew Valley. However, things are kind of odd. The way the farmer looks is weird. The way he's running around is kind of weird.

The colors are now more saturated, which is true to form, but yet that exact shade of Stardew Valley yellow dirt hasn't quite been established yet. But yeah, this version of Stardew Valley was basically more of like a sandbox idea. In this iteration, this is like the weirdest time for the game. I feel like it's like the Sardey Valley hit puberty here. But, so you would like actually buy animals and buildings from your in-game menu rather than go to Robin. And there was that farm map you just saw, like that was pretty cool actually, that farm map. You guys are going to be mad at me that that's not in Stardew Valley anymore.

But yeah, it was a little bit more of the day and crop of the week, but I got rid of that because there's this fundamental problem where you can store things in chests in Stardew Valley. So this creates this incentive to just never ship anything until the crop is crop of the week or the item is item of the day and I just don't think that's very fun. You don't ever want to incentivize things that aren't fun. That's game dev 101. Alright you can see here it's starting to look

like Pierre's. Starting to look like that old familiar shop. But anyway, maybe let's jump ahead a little bit and check out what the mines are looking like in 2013. So, this was the era of the procedurally generated mines. My idea was, I wanted the mines to be like Terraria, but top-down instead of side-scrolling. scrolling and it was very bug prone, which it just ended up being too complicated, I think. It was maybe just beyond my ability, I don't know.

Or maybe another way to think about it was just that it was too ambitious of a concept for the scope of this game. This should have been an entire game on its own. And, you know, if you've played Core Keeper, that's pretty much what Core Keeper is. Which is a cool game

by the way. But yeah, when I saw Core Keeper I was like, hey, someone finally did it. So, cool idea, but I had to make the hard decision to scrap all of it. And I spent a long time working on this too. But I made the decision to scrap all of it and, uh, let's see, there's a bug right there. Do a simpler approach, which is the mines that are in Stardew Valley today, where it's not procedurally generated. There's some randomness, but the levels are all designed by hand. Here we have a goblin village, an underground goblin village.

All this content completely scrapped from the game. And I mean, I don't regret it. Just because something sounds cool, just because the idea is cool, doesn't mean that it's going to be fun or it's going to be the right idea in practice. Oh, and by the way, Goblin, Underground Goblin Villages are not canon. All right? villages are not canon. Alright, anything you see here from previous builds is not considered to be canonical Stardew Valley. Alright, let's move on to yet

another more recent version. So this one's from sometime in 2014. This was the title screen at that time. I mean it's kind of glitching out, but it had these weird buttons on the side. And then when you loaded the game there was this loading screen which was kind of reminiscent of like the Sims but I mean it doesn't look too much different than the last build but you start to see some more Stardew Valley things come into place like the what we call the

daytime money box in the upper right is there. Willie's shop is basically looking like it always does. We now have the community center in the game and it looks essentially exactly the same as it does now. Not sure why there's this ugly yellow color, this ugly yellow filter over the entire screen. You'll notice Clint was a little less doughy back then. And Joja Mart was not yet in town. Hat Mouse wasn't a thing yet. And the inside of the farmhouse was like very static.

I don't even think you could move any of the furniture. Which allowed me to have the pixel art look kind of nice with some shading and stuff. But I mean I think it's important that you can decorate your house.

People love that.

So this is from August 2015, which is only about a half year from launch. But still, there are a ton of things that are like not finished yet. So this shows just how much Stardew Valley kind of came together at the last moment. The farmhouse still has this weird, uh, protuberanceicking protubence? Is that a word? This weird, uh, thing, this nose sticking out right next to the door. I don't know what I was thinking there.

Um, but obviously I got rid of that at some point. The mailbox is still on the left. So that must've changed that. You know, it's like I did a ton of work in the last like six months. I think I was just at the point where I knew it was so close, I needed to finish the game, the finish line was so close, and that's what gave me the drive and the motivation to make

all these little changes in the last six months to prepare the game for release. I think one of the most notable things was just that the farmer still had this weird, goofy look. This is not what the farmer looks like in Stardew Valley, so that was like a last minute change. Which I'm really glad about because I don't really like the way this looks.

Looks kind of stiff. Kind of like a Pinocchio or something. Yep, there's the old classic Stardew Valley mines. So that's pretty much the last convenient footage that I have from before launch. I do want to give a shout out to my two beta testers Bexy and Siri who helped me find a ton of bugs in the game. Here's a screenshot from Bexy's farm. This is one of the first ever Stardew Valley farms. Looks pretty good. Thank you guys so much.

So here we are February 26th 2016 the culmination of four and a half years of work the launch of Stardew Valley. A lot was riding on this because if it flopped I would have been four and a half years behind my peers with no money, no job experience. Would have been pretty depressing.

I stayed up all night the night before because I found a bug and I had to fix it because the game was set to launch the next morning. So that was highly stressful. On the first day of launch, Stardew sold just under 40,000 copies, which was already beyond my wildest dreams. After that first day, I knew that this was going to be a big deal.

I knew that I could be a game developer from now on. It was really happening. Of course I didn't really have time to think about that too much because there were immediately bugs being found in the game and I spent the next... I think I released a patch every single day for the next four days after launch. Pretty big patches too. But see back then the game was a lot simpler. There wasn't different

languages. There wasn't multiplayer. It was just me working on it so I could crank out a- it was only on Steam! I didn't have to make a console build. I didn't have to make a mobile build. So I could crank out updates at an extremely fast pace. I spent the rest of that spring fixing every bug that people found and trying to add meaningful improvements to the game with each patch. I was releasing patches pretty rapidly. Some notable examples were

Grandpa's shrine and his evaluation. When the game first came out, Grandpa was extremely harsh and he would kind of, he was almost a little bit rude. You know, if you didn't do a good job he would say, man I should have bequeathed the farm to my other grandkid. And there was no way to re-evaluate. If you didn't get the four spirit candles the first time, forget about it. So I softened that and I also added in the way that you can have them come back and re-evaluate.

Here's another example. On March 20th, I added unique dialogues for all the spouses. So, I don't remember this, apparently before then every single spouse had identical dialogue and people still complain about this but there's been a ton of work on the spouses over the years and it just goes to show that you know even though Stardew Valley was launched in my mind it was not its ultimate form that's why I kept making updates that's why I essentially as soon

as these bug fix patches were out of the way I immediately started working on the 1.1 update which is a major the first major content update. So I'll just briefly go over the updates. If you want to see everything that's been added to Stardew Valley I recommend going to the version history page on the Stardew Valley wiki. But yeah, the 1.1 update added four new farm types and kind of established the tradition of every update adding new farm types to the game. And notably it

added Shane and Emily as marriage candidates, which you, the community, voted on, on a poll that I put on Twitter. 1.2 just added new languages to the game. It wasn't really a content update. I hadn't yet established the tradition of 1.x updates always being major content updates. So then we had the 1.3 update, which most importantly added multiplayer to the game,

fulfilling the promise I had made to the players before Stardew Valley even came out. 1.3 also added the Winter Night Market and a few other things. One thing about 1.3 is the multiplayer was actually developed, you know, not by me. It was put in by a guy named Tom Coxon,

who went on to create a game called Cassette Beasts. You should check it out. Thanks, Tom. But, yeah, it started this new era where I was open to getting help on the actual development of Stardew Valley which allowed for bigger more ambitious updates. So then there was the 1.4 update which added the movie theater, fish ponds, 14 art events to all the

spouses, and many other great things to the game. Then we had the 1.5 update which added a huge endgame location, Ginger Island. The Kui quests and this idea of perfection. The volcano which allowed you to enchant your weapons and tools and many other great things. Then there was the 1.6 update, the most recent update. Kind of a return to the valley after 1.5's Ginger Island. 1.6 added some new systems, some endgame content, it kind of filled in some gaps that I feel like were present in the game

and it added some old ideas that I've had for a long time like green rain.

So those were all the major updates to Stardew Valley in a nutshell. Of course there were some intermediary updates in between all of those major ones which sometimes added some important things to the game. But those were the major updates. Now what's next? Well as I've already announced there is a 1.7 update in the works but I don't want to reveal too much about what's in the update yet. Although I did announce that there would be two new marriage candidates and I'm gonna reveal those soon. I know you guys are probably bored out of your minds by this and you're just waiting for me to get to the unveiling of the marriage candidates, right?

But I just have one more thing to say. I have in my hands an envelope with the names of the two new marriage candidates that will be added in 1.7. But before I open that up and reveal the names to you, I just wanted to say thank you so much for supporting Stardew Valley over the past 10 years.

For all the mods, the fan art, all the letters, and the comments you've made to me telling me how much Stardew Valley has meant to you. That's meant a lot to me too. And it's really given me a lot of purpose in life. So I'm grateful to you for making this a reality for me. Thank you so much.

I also just want to thank everyone else who's been part of the Stardew Valley journey from the other developers who have helped me out over the years, to the merchandise companies who have created all these cool Stardew Valley items, the people who have run the Stardew Valley concerts, Cole for helping me make the Stardew Valley board game, and so many other cool things that have come about over the past 10 years. So thank you so much to everyone. Now let's get down to business. Alright here it is 1. Clint and Sandy. It's their turn. It's their time.

Alright. Alright.

Well, thanks for watching, and I hope you have a great day. Bye. so ♪