Even as Stardew Valley continues to be a best-selling title with massive updates releasing for players nearly a decade after it launched, developer ConcernedApe remains opens and honest with his fans.
Eric Barone, known online as ConcernedApe, has offered fans a few sneak peeks at Haunted Chocolatier since he first revealed it in 2021. He shared a long-awaited update this week where he revealed he hasn’t “been able to work on Haunted Chocolatier in a while,” but that he’s “done a ton of work on the game” since development began.
Barone said that he feels a strong sense of duty and obligation to Stardew Valley fans on top of having “a lot of attachment” to the farming sim game, but that he also has a “strong desire to make more games.”
Although he hasn’t been able to commit much time recently to the new game, Barone said he has “a skeleton of the game with most (not all) of its bones in place,” and is giving Haunted Chocolatier the same development treatment as Stardew.
“I’m coding it (mostly from scratch) in C# and I’m working solo in all areas,” Barone wrote on the game’s website. “Why?… It’s what I’m comfortable with, it’s what I enjoy, and it worked well for Stardew Valley. I may get help with some technical things later on, but I want the game to be essentially complete before I think about anything like that.”
He said that, just like with Stardew Valley, there will be no early access, crowdfunding, or pre-orders “so I don’t feel a ton of external pressure to finish the game on a timeline.” I was one of those who followed Stardew Valley for years prior to its launch and, as someone who continues to play from day-one, I’ll let Barone do his thing.
“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.”
He shared some new screenshots of the game in the blog, including a look at character equipment slots, a slime-infested action shot, some character portraits, and an exterior shot of a building next to a river with a hydraulic wheel and some crops. The look is distinctly Barone’s Stardew-esque pixel art but also has it’s own vibe. He noted, as always, the art is a work in progress and will likely to change as development continues.
“I think I’ve written a lot of this same stuff in previous posts, but I just wanted to check in with all of you, let you know that Haunted Chocolatier is still going to be a thing, and re-affirm some of the stuff I’ve said before,” Barone wrote. “Thank you for reading all this, and I look forward to sharing this new world with you… when it’s ready.”
