Despite just how large Stardew Valley has become over the years, many players dove into the farming simulator in part to its humble beginnings as an indie game. The game began as a way for Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone, who was a recent computer science graduate struggling to find his way in the industry, to improve his computer and artistic skills at the same time, and is now known as one of the best farming simulators on the market. It's understandable that ConcernedApe's second game, Haunted Chocolatier, would be rather anticipated as a result.
However, ConcernedApe has revealed that Haunted Chocolatier's development is currently paused, and it's not known how long this break will last. It's due to Stardew Valley's upcoming 1.6 update which aims to make modding easier and also more "powerful" as ConcernedApe has clarified on Twitter. It comes with a few new features to the game as well, but "much less" than what 1.5 added. Some players may wonder why such a "small-scale" update might stop Haunted Chocolatier in its tracks for now, but it's easy to understand why.
ConcernedApe is a One-Man Band
As Stardew Valley was made to strengthen ConcernedApe's personal skills and even to fix his own personal complaints on how the Harvest Moon series lost its touch as time went by, he developed the entire game solo. The only thing close to a partner he has was Chucklefish, and even then, circumstances led to ConcernedApe cutting ties with the British development studio last year.
Due to the fact that ConcernedApe found a lot of satisfaction in his solo development cycle with Stardew, Haunted Chocolatier was planned from the start to be yet another project spearheaded by him and only him. This means that, like Stardew Valley, ConcernedApe is handling every bit of the game by himself. He's making the sprites, composing the songs, writing the main story, and whatever else Haunted Chocolatier requires of him.
That's not all ConcernedApe has on his plate, either. He's stated that he's working on an unannounced collaboration game alongside Haunted Chocolatier at the same time. This makes the fact that his next full-fledged game solo has taken a backseat to Stardew Valley even more understandable, as that's a lot of plates to juggle.
It can't be stated enough that working on a game as a solo developer, while rewarding for some, can be extremely taxing. ConcernedApe choosing to work on his own games is quite a feat in itself, as even Toby Fox, the developer of Undertale, ended up creating a team of close friends to assist with Deltarunedue to the large workload that Deltarune would ask of him. Moreover, with a team, Toby Fox has guaranteed that Deltarune's progress will be significantly faster. It's thanks to Toby Fox and his friends' combined efforts that the turnaround for Chapter 2 compared to Chapter 1 didn't take keep fans waiting long.
Commendable as it may be, ConcernedApe working on Haunted Chocolatier by himself will easily add quite some time to the game's development cycle, which means that Stardew Valley's successor may have been announced too early, and fans may have to wait longer than they think for Haunted Chocolatier to come out. However, it only took ConcernedApe four years to finish Stardew, with the rest of the content the game has to offer being added in free updates over the years. It could be possible that Haunted Chocolatier may take the same amount of time, but it all depends on when ConcernedApe believes he's made an experience worth calling "complete."
Haunted Chocolatier is in development.