Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone, who said in April that he's "committed to not working on Stardew Valley until I'm done with Haunted Chocolatier," announced last week that he's working on Stardew Valley again. Well, hey, these things happen. But the good news (aside from more Stardew Valley) is that while Haunted Chocolatier might take a little longer to arrive as a result of the ongoing Stardew efforts, it probably (maybe) won't make a huge difference.
"Maybe a little," Barone said about the possibility of Haunted Chocolatier being pushed back because of this new Stardew Valley update. "But not as much as you might think."
The reason, Barone explained, is that he has a team helping with the Stardew Valley updates—something that's been the case since the 1.3 update, which debuted on PC back in 2018—and he's "trying to take more of a 'creative director' role" on this update than he has in the past, when he was "fully, personally locked-in on content development the whole time."
That means Barone can stay mostly focused on Haunted Chocolatier, although he acknowledged that at some point he'll have to turn a little more of his attention to Stardew Valley.
"In order for me to maintain a full connection to the game, I need my hand to touch every piece of new content," Barone wrote. "And there are some aspects of content development which I insist on doing myself, like the music. But with our 'no release date' approach to the 1.7 update, it’s not certain when that time will come. It might even be after Haunted Chocolatier comes out."
But it might not be, too: Presumably anticipating the inevitability of Haunted hype, he double-hedged against committing to anything specific, writing, "no guarantees though," immediately followed by "also, any of this may change in the future."
As he has in the past, Barone said the persistent popularity of Stardew Valley makes it difficult for him to let it go when there are still ways he could make it better. "The reality of my life is that I have a very popular first game that I still want to take care of, which means that my second game might take a little longer. It is what it is," he wrote.
"I didn’t have to make a 1.7 update for Stardew Valley, but the game is still so popular (in fact, still growing), that it’s hard to just stop improving it when there are still things that can be improved. But I hope the approach I am taking for Stardew Valley 1.7 will help keep Haunted Chocolatier on track."
Barone also took a minute to throw props to his Stardew Valley team, saying "they are awesome, all very talented, hard-working, and contribute unique things to the development process." But, he added, "I am still working completely solo on Haunted Chocolatier without any plans to change that for the time being."
I sympathize with Barone to an extent: It's hard to quit a thing you love, and doubly so, I'm sure, when that love is shared by people around the world. The good news for him is that Stardew fans are surely used to this by now (Barone's been saying 'never say never' for a while now), and as eager as they are for Haunted Chocolatier, I don't think anyone's going to be leaning on him too hard to get it on with it.
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