Stardew Valley fans, there's been an update on the developer's highly awaited next game, Haunted Chocolatier. But before you get too excited, remember these things take a SquidFest's worth of work to create.
The farming/role-playing game's designer, Eric Barone, who works under under the alias ConcernedApe, published a blog post on Wednesday checking in about Haunted Chocolatier's development and reminding fans that it takes time to make a game like this from scratch — and notably solo.
Barone said he'd been working on the recently released Stardew Valley 1.6 update, originally announced in April 2023, which meant he had to bench Haunted Chocolatier for a moment as he added new content and fixed bugs. But the developer said he has "created a 'vertical slice' of Haunted Chocolatier, essentially a skeleton of the game with most (not all) of its bones in place."
"It’s been a little sad to see Haunted Chocolatier getting dusty on the shelf… but this is the reality of my situation," he wrote. "Stardew Valley is a big and popular game, and I have a lot of attachment to it. I also feel a strong sense of duty and obligation to all the people who have bought Stardew Valley over the years, granting me this rare opportunity to be an indie game developer. So it’s hard to 'let go' of Stardew, even temporarily, to work on something that isn’t already established and meaningful to people."
For fans, Barone shared a little of the "vertical slice" he's created so far for Haunted Chocolatier, with screenshots he noted were "'work in progress' and likely to change before release." Barone is coding the game himself in the Microsoft platform C# (as Stardew Valley was) and entirely from scratch.
In the post, you can see an adorable hovering ghost character, a scene showing the titular chocolatier's home with rows of vegetables suggesting that requisite farming element, a scene showing the player fighting off a giant horde of incoming pink and purple blobs with a sword (Barone has previously said the game will have "a greater focus on combat" than Stardew), an inventory menu, and two characters (one with purple hair, one blonde).
These are just the latest additions to the sneak peeks we've seen in ConcernedApe's existing screenshots which you can check out on the website. Plus, here's the early gameplay trailer from 2021 you can still savour:
Barone explained there will be no preorders, crowdfunding, or early access of any kind with Haunted Chocolatier, "so I don’t feel a ton of external pressure to finish the game on a timeline. 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. 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."
Enjoy the snippet and head back to your cauliflowers, folks. It'll be here when it gets here.
