Year: 2025

Recently, I announced that there will be another major content update for Stardew Valley — the 1.7 update.

You might be wondering: If ConcernedApe is working on Stardew Valley 1.7, will that cause Haunted Chocolatier to take longer?

The answer: Maybe a little, but not as much as you might think.

Why: I have a team who helps me with Stardew Valley updates now (this has been true since the 1.3 update). Unlike the previous updates (in which I was fully, personally locked-in on content development the whole time), with 1.7 I have been trying to take more of a “creative director” role in the team, so that (at least for now) I can focus the vast majority of my attention on Haunted Chocolatier. So far, it’s been pretty good… we are working at a relaxed pace, we have a ton of ideas, and everything has been high quality. Eventually, I will have to spend a little more time focused on Stardew Valley, because in order for me to maintain a full connection to the game, I need my hand to touch every piece of new content. 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. (no guarantees though)

(also, any of this may change in the future)

At any rate, Haunted Chocolatier will be released at some point. And sure, the reality of my life is that I have a very popular 1st game that I still want to take care of, which means that my 2nd game might take a little longer. It is what it is. 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.

About the Stardew Valley team: they are awesome, all very talented, hard-working, and contribute unique things to the development process. We are a very small group, and I like it that way. Also, I am still working completely solo on Haunted Chocolatier without any plans to change that for the time being.

I’ve been very busy lately, with PAX weekend and the kickoff of the 2nd Stardew Valley concert tour. Now that those things are simmering down a little, I’m excited to dive back into Haunted Chocolatier development once again.

Thanks for reading

-Ape

In a recent interview, I was asked about my design philosophy for Haunted Chocolatier, and I talked for a bit about my interest in the “intuition”, and using an intuitive process to make chocolates. I wanted to elaborate on that a little bit here.

It’s true that I am interested in the intuition. As someone without formal training in art, music, or game design, I rely heavily on intuition and feeling to do my work. I think it’s where creativity comes from. You can’t really “engineer” creativity… it comes from a mysterious, indeterminate part of our being. But it’s a crucial and important part of what makes us human.

Video games, on the other hand, exist within mechanical devices, and are governed by mechanical laws. They can’t ever truly be intuitive in nature, except to the degree in which they rely on the player as the intuitive agent.

So really, there’s no way to make a TRULY intuitive chocolate making system in Haunted Chocolatier. The best I can do is make it seem intuitive on the surface. But eventually, min-maxers will reverse engineer everything and find out how to optimally game the system. Oh well.

For that reason, as well as my general design philosophy of giving players multiple paths to reach the same goal, I’m going to offer more than one way of making chocolate. There will be a more “intuitive” way, but there are also more conventional ways to do it. There will be reasons to use both, but you could just focus on one or the other if you wanted to. At their core, they are all processes in which you convert ingredients into final products. It’s just that one process might be more “whimsical”, and another process might be more mechanical.

Anyway, I’m probably getting too philosophical about all this. At the end of the day, a game has to be fun. That’s what is most important, and that is always my primary goal. Everything else is secondary. So, keep in mind anything I ever say about Haunted Chocolatier is subject to change if I ever feel like it’s not as fun as it could be.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day

-Ape

TLDR: There will be more than one way to make chocolate