Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone (ConcernedApe) has released a 10th anniversary video revealing, among other things, two brand new marriage candidates being added to the game in the upcoming patch 1.7: Clint and Sandy.

Clint has long been a requested bachelor by the Stardew Valley community. As the valley blacksmith, he's the one who upgrades all the player's tools and opens geodes for them, meaning visiting him regularly is pretty common. But players have wanted to romance him largely because of his awkward relationship with an existing marriage candidate, Emily. Clint has a huge crush on Emily that remains unrequited even the player doesn't marry Emily, but has a few scenes where he seems downright hurt if they do. Giving Clint more of a storyline that his current tactiturn, awkward lines is a much-needed change.

Sandy has also been a requested marriageable villager. She's the manager of the Oasis in the Desert, meaning players don't usually see her until they've played for a while. And unfortunately she never actually leaves the Oasis, so there are fewer opportunities for interactions with her. However, she's kind to the player, leaving the fandom hungry for more Sandy storyline and more interactions with her, which they'll certainly get now.

Additionally, ConcernedApe opened the video by showing off some old builds of Stardew Valley (then "Sprout Valley") along with his own commentary. The sequence begins with the game's original 2012 look, six months into development, when he had a "functioning game" that was very rudimentary, and similar to the original Harvest Moon game. Even so, you can see how much the basic design of the game looks very similar, right down to where things are located in Pelican Town, the bus, and more.

Next, he shows off a 2013 build that looks a looooot more familiar. The art has been significantly updated to roughly the style of current Stardew Valley. ConcernedApe says this version of the game (now titled "Stardew Valley") was more sandboxy than the current version of the game and less RPG. Additionally, the mines were procedurally generated, and you had to mine into the walls to find ore and secrets. This ended up being too complicated, "too ambitious of a concept for the scope of this game. This should have been a whole game on its own", ConcernedApe said. He also showed off an underground Goblin Village that was totally scrapped. "Just because an idea sounds cool doesn't mean it's fun or the right idea in practice."

Here, ConcernedApe said that nothing in these early builds should be considered "canon" in the Stardew Valley universe.

2014's build introduced the Community Center, but other staples such as Joja Mart and Hat Mouse hadn't been added yet. You also couldn't decorate the inside of your house yet.

And another build from August 2015, half a year from launch, shows "how much of this came together at the last moment." To my eye, this looks almost identical to launch day Stardew Valley, but ConcernedApe points out various changes like the location of the mailbox, the shape of the inside of the player's house, and the final look of the main character.

In a reflection on the game's launch, ConcernedApe talks about what the release of the game was like for him and meant to him, including sharing that the game sold just under 40,000 copies in the first day alone, at which point he knew it would be a success. He ended the video with a recap of the game's updates over the years, and by thanking the community for its support over the years.

Patch 1.7 is coming at a later date. ConcernedApe didn't reveal any further details as to what it might entail for now, but today's announcement should tide everyone over for a bit.

Today is Stardew Valley's 10th anniversary, and we celebrated earlier this month already by interviewing ConcernedApe about topics such as why there isn't a Stardew Valley TV show, and the one secret left that the Stardew Valley community has yet to find. You can read our full, in-depth interview with the creator right here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Highguard studio Wildlight Entertainment reportedly has less than 20 people remaining to work on the game following a round of devastating layoffs just weeks after the game's launch.

This comes from a new Bloomberg report, which tells the story of Wildlight's rise and fall since its founders first assembled the team back in 2021. Made up of Respawn veterans, the group hoped to recreate the successes of Apex Legends and Titanfall, initially with a survival-focused shooter.

When that design didn't quite work as well as they'd hoped, they scrapped it and pivoted to Highguard, leaving remnants of the original survival game in the final draft of what was now a hero shooter. As the game progressed, testers had positive feedback that had the developers hopeful, though notably they also said it was more fun on microphone with voice chat, and the experience was too complicated and less fun without them.

Sources speaking to Bloomberg say the studio largely had a positive culture and the team felt good about what they were making up until the game's announcement at The Game Awards last December, which apparently came about at Geoff Keighley's urging after he enjoyed what he played of it. The team originally intended to announce and launch Highguard simultaneously, but with The Game Awards announcement that left a month-and-a-half-long silence between announcement and launch during which the internet had a field day.

The game launched to a celebration-worthy number of Steam concurrents, but unfortunately was unable to retain players for very long at all, meaning it made very little money from microtransactions. Reviews were also poor. Though the developers at Wildlight believed they had financial runway to improve, financial backer Tencent suddenly pulled its funding, and most of the 100-person team was laid off as a result. Fewer than 20 individuals remain to try and save Highguard. Those developers have recently reassured that a new patch is on the way, after a website issue led players to believe the whole game was being taken down.

The full story is at Bloomberg.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Surgent Studios, the developer behind Tales of Kenzara: ZAU, has unveiled its next game today, and it's...absolutely nothing like Tales of Kenzara: ZAU. It's called FixForce, and it's a chaotic cooperative "extraction platformer" about a team of robots fixing machines using random parts they find lying around.

FixForce puts up to six players together as a robot repair crew sent into an area to fix various broken structures littered around the area within an allotted amount of time. Each broken machine indicates what parts are needed to fix it, and those parts can be found scattered around the level.

However, many of those pieces will be stuck behind obstacles: bodies of water robots can't swim through, up tall towers, guarded by evil enemy robots. To collect them, you'll need to use your robot building abilities to pick up and place objects strategically so you and your friends can climb across them to reach whatever it is you need. And if you're injured by an obstacle, your head will fall off, and your teammates will need to find your head and body and stack them back together to resurrect you back into the game. Teams earn points based on how many things they fix within the time limit.

I got a chance to play a round of FixForce ahead of the announcement alongside the developers, and yeah, the level of silly chaos implied in the announcement trailer pretty much encapsulates it. It's easy to get distracted goofing around with all the objects in the level and building weird, random things, but FixForce also lends itself to silly emergent moments, like when one of the devs tried to toss platforms at me to save me from being stuck on an island, and instead slammed one into me and knocked me right into the water.

It was a surprisingly cheery and silly time for a studio that just made a game about grieving the death of a loved one. That fact is not lost on founder Abubakar Salim, though.

“As FixForce came together, we saw the pure chaos and hilarity it was unleashing and made the decision to move quickly and publish it ourselves," he said in a statement. "Yes, FixForce is completely unlike anything we’ve ever done before, but look: we made one game about grief and another about abuse and thought, ‘can we have a little bit of silly, stupid fun for a second?’ I promise we’ll go back to dark and depressing after this.”

Notably, this isn't the same game Salim announced in 2024, Project Uso, nor is it the horror game announced last year to be published by Pocketpair. Surgent clearly has a lot of irons in the fire here, but its eagerness to get something released quickly makes sense given the scale of its long-term ambitions and its financial struggles in 2024.

FixForce is dropping in early access on March 12 on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, and its full, final release will also be on Xbox, the studio says.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.