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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.
"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."
