Stardew Valley creator says he's done "a ton of work" on his next game Haunted Chocolatier, but it needs a lot more: "It’s okay, I’m addicted to the grind"

Stardew Valley creator Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone has an early Christmas gift for fans eagerly awaiting his next game: a development update blog detailing just what's going on with Haunted Chocolatier. In short, it hasn't been abandoned and a ton of work has already been done, but a lot more work needs to be done before it's ready for release.

"Even though Haunted Chocolatier has only been revealed publicly to a tiny degree," Barone explains in the blog post, "in my own private world it’s a special place, and I’m very attached to the characters, themes, and ideas. Also, I’ve already done a ton of work on the game. Before I took this break for Stardew 1.6, I had created a 'vertical slice' of Haunted Chocolatier, essentially a skeleton of the game with most (not all) of its bones in place."

Barone says his "next task will be to tweak the existing bones until I’m happy with them, add all the rest of the bones, and then flesh it all out with all the content that will need to be in the game. Yes, it’s going to be a lot of work still, but it’s okay, I’m addicted to the grind." Barone goes on to note that he's making Haunted Chocolatier just like he made Stardew Valley, coding the game in C# and working solo across the entire production.

"I know many people are excited to play Haunted Chocolatier, and may be disappointed to hear that it will still take a while, or that I took time away to work on Stardew Valley. I understand. I will be very happy when the day comes that I can finally release Haunted Chocolatier." Like Stardew, the new game won't offer early access, crowdfunding, or pre-orders, which means Barone doesn't "feel a ton of external pressure" to release Haunted Chocolatier on any timeline but his own.

"The major source of external pressure is the fact I announced the game kind of early (I had my reasons for doing this), which built up excitement, meaning that if I take a long time, people might become sad," Barone says. "And that is a real pressure to me. But ultimately, I will not release a game unless it is complete and I am very happy with it, and I think that’s what most people would want, anyway."

Barone also says his "preferred approach is to disappear and work in isolation, and only emerge when I have something complete and worthy, rather than share a bunch of stuff that is unfinished, and therefore not in accordance with the final vision." But he teases that more blogs along these lines will offer further updates on Haunted Chocolatier's development in the future. "Regardless of dev blog timing, know that the game will eventually be finished and come out."

Barone recently said Haunted Chocolatier isn't just a "copy and paste" of his iconic farming sim: "They haven't played the game, so they don't really know."