ConcernedApe Explains How Much He Officially Works on Haunted Chocolatier and Stardew Valley

Haunted Chocolatier is still in active development by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, who has finally shared just how much time he actually spends working on the game. As an indirect follow-up to the incredibly successful Stardew Valley, Haunted Chocolatier has some big expectations to meet, as Barone’s seminal farming RPG has redefined its niche and become the go-to option for anyone even remotely interested in playing a game like it.

Crucially, Stardew Valley is still getting content updates, and these necessarily led to delays for Haunted Chocolatier. ConcernedApe is thoroughly uninterested in “finishing” his first mainstream release, and so he keeps picking at it with occasional new content and feature releases. As he explained in a recent interview, however, there are some new challenges he’s been facing since Haunted Chocolatier was first announced.

Stardew Valley Creator Confirms Exciting Detail About Haunted Chocolatier

After revealing that fans won’t be able to play Haunted Chocolatier until at least 2030, ConcernedApe teases the game’s size.

ConcernedApe Works on Haunted Chocolatier 5 Days a Week

Eric Barone spoke to Game Informer (via GamesRadar) in a recent interview, saying that he’s now working on Haunted Chocolatier five days a week. The remaining two days go to Stardew Valley and its never-ending array of updates. Barone hadn’t issued any updates on the progress for some time, until earlier this year he confirmed that Haunted Chocolatier is still in production, as some had gotten concerned. Now, he explained that “[making Haunted Chocolatier is] a lot harder than when I was making Stardew Valley.” He said that he was a “nobody” back then, whereas now he gets lots of fan mail and “business people asking me for this or that all the time.” Pure game development has been slowed down by all the additional overhead, in other words.

Who’s That Character?

Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.

Who’s That Character?

Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.

Easy (7.5s)Medium (5.0s)Hard (2.5s)Permadeath (2.5s)

“I need to just disappear, go into a cabin, and work without distraction,” he said. “So it is very difficult and distracting, I’ll be honest, to have Stardew Valley and have people sending me fan mail. I appreciate that people love the game so much, but it is true that it’s difficult to juggle all those things and to be able to fully lock in.” The last big update on the status of Haunted Chocolatier came just ahead of Stardew Valley‘s 10th anniversary, explaining that ConcernedApe had been struggling with the back-and-forth between the two games. The additional overhead has only grown more pressing since, judging by the recent interview, and it’s not helping with the games’ production.

Ghosts running shop in Haunted Chocolatier

Even though Haunted Chocolatier was announced over five years ago, it seems all but obvious that it’s not coming out soon. The good news is that Stardew Valley still has undiscovered secrets in tow, as shocking as that might seem. With all the extra post-launch updates ConcernedApe and his team have been putting out, there’s merit in outright replaying the game from scratch, too, for those who haven’t done so since it first launched back in 2016. At the same time, Haunted Chocolatier is supposed to be bigger, better, and more complex, so it may be hard to “settle” for a good old farming game with that in mind.

Balance the critic averages

Easy (6)Medium (8)Hard (10)

It’s not that there’s a shortage of things to do in Stardew Valley. With about 50-60 hours’ worth of gameplay just to complete the main Community Center-focused story, Stardew Valley‘s optional content easily doubles or even triples that number, depending on how deeply the player wishes to interact with its gameplay systems. To say nothing of the fact that it’s a fully open-ended game that can be played into infinity. Haunted Chocolatier is likely to fall into the same ballpark, except with an obvious focus towards chocolate and candy-making instead of farming. Everything else, however, is still up in the air, and ConcernedApe hasn’t provided an inkling of information on when to expect the game to be out.