Eric Barone has a problem: He wants to make his new game, Haunted Chocolatier, but he also has a deep love for his indie mega-hit Stardew Valley—and, more to the point, a seeming inability to stop working on it. It's a tough spot alright, one he's talked about before, but speaking to PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon at GDC recently, Barone said he's got a plan, or at least an idea: Run away into the forest and stay there until it's done.
Barone's continued to work on the "vertical slice" of Haunted Chocolatier, while at the same time "trying to stay relaxed and stress free," and avoid rushing too much. But the pressure of Stardew Valley is always hanging overhead: Even though the game has been out for nine years and remains massively popular, he just can't stop. Barone said last year that he could work on Stardew Valley "for the rest of my life" and it sure doesn't seem like he was kidding.
"I do love Stardew Valley and I care about the fans and I want the fans to have a great experience," Barone said during our GDC chat. "So I'm always concerned with Stardew Valley and making sure that it's doing well, and that pulls me away from devoting all my time to Haunted Chocolatier.
"I think at some point I'm going to have to completely cut off everything else. Honestly, I've thought about, maybe I should just go into a cabin in the woods and completely get off the internet, and just say, 'Okay guys, I'll see you in two years. You won't hear from me at all and I'm going to finish this game'."
Barone spent much of 2024 working on Stardew Valley's big 1.6 update, which he said would need to be "bug-free" and out on both PC and consoles before he could shift his focus back to Haunted Chocolatier. Now, he said, he's finally ready to take time away from the farm.
"The 1.6 update is pretty settled at this point. There were ongoing console ports and bug fixes, but it's pretty settled now. I'm committed to not working on Stardew Valley until I'm done with Haunted Chocolatier… I think it's in a good place. I feel very solid about it. I think if anyone picks up Stardew Valley for the first time in 2025, I'm very proud of it, and I think they'll have fun with it if they like this kind of game."
But Stardew Valley isn't the only stumbling block Barone faces on the road to his next game. The long development process of Haunted Chocolatier, he said, is in part the result of, well, the long development process of Haunted Chocolatier.
"It's been a few years that I've been working on it now and it's like, I look at some of the stuff I did at the beginning and I'm like, 'Oh man, here we go again. I'm gonna have to redo all of this'," Barone said. "And it's not it's not like it's even bad, it's just—part of the problem of being, like especially a solo dev, is it takes so long to make a game. I'm literally a different person in four years, so it's like my whole feelings about everything have changed—my aesthetic sensibilities have evolved."
Sounds like exactly the sort of problem a couple years in an isolated cabin would fix.
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