While the big reveal in today's 10th anniversary Stardew Valley video was the confirmation of the two new marriage candidates, creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone also took us on a fascinating tour of the game in its earliest stages of development. At one point, there was even an in-game farm map that I very much wish was still there.
After demonstrating one of the game's earliest builds in the video, from back when it was known as Sprout Valley and looked even more like a Harvest Moon fan game, Barone flipped the calendar forward to 2013, when he'd been working on the project "maybe a little over a year." Here, it much more closely resembles the Stardew Valley we know today, but at this point Barone said the game "was a little bit more of a simulation concept, I guess, than an RPG."
"This is like the weirdest time for the game," Barone explained. "I feel like it's like Stardew Valley hit puberty here. So you would actually buy animals and buildings from your in-game menu rather than go to Robin. And there was that farm map you just saw. That was pretty cool, actually, that farm map. I bet you guys are gonna be mad at me that that's not in Stardew Valley anymore."
"Mad" might be overstating it, but I gotta say, I'm now retroactively a little disappointed that this map didn't make the final game. It offers a complete overview of your entire farm, which would be very useful for planning out all your crops and building locations. And, like… maps are just cool! I'd love to be able to get a more comprehensive birds-eye view of what I'm creating in the vanilla game, but alas, it seems it was not meant to be.
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