Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone acknowledged earlier this year that his long-awaited next game, Haunted Chocolatier, started "getting dusty on the shelf" while he worked on Stardew Valley's 1.6 patch. As much as I'm looking forward to his ghosts and ganache life sim, I don't think there are many among us who'd fault Barone for continuing to tinker with the beloved farm sim that made him famous.
He's hardly the only one who's struggled to move on from a hit game. His story echoes that of Terraria developers Andrew "Redigit" Spinks and ReLogic, who keep making that game's "last" update only to make yet another huge one every time. I'm also reminded of George Lucas' famous inability to quit messing with Star Wars, although the controversial film re-releases aren't quite the same thing as well-received Stardew Valley additions and bug fixes—I don't think anyone's really complaining in this case.
I imagine it was especially satisfying for Barone to squash the harvesting bug back in March: If you missed that one, it turns out left-to-right harvesting had been 100ms faster than right-to-left harvesting for the past eight years. It was a tiny error that most people never noticed, but I bet someone out there was being driven mad by it this whole time.
I've never spent years updating a hit game, but it's easy to relate to the cycle of fixing, tweaking, building, and rebuilding that can turn any project into a forever project. Every time you fix one thing, you notice something else that could use improvement, and each addition generates ideas for more possible additions. Legend has it that turn-of-the-century eccentric Sarah Winchester had workers continuously add rooms to her bizarre California mansion for decades to confuse vengeful spirits, but I think she just kept noticing walls that would look better with doors on them, and it all got out of control.
And, of course, Barone has Stardew Valley's immense popularity to contend with.
"Stardew Valley is a big and popular game, and I have a lot of attachment to it," Barone said earlier this month. "I also feel a strong sense of duty and obligation to all the people who have bought Stardew Valley over the years, granting me this rare opportunity to be an indie game developer. So it's hard to 'let go' of Stardew, even temporarily, to work on something that isn't already established and meaningful to people."
Despite his choice not to let go of Stardew just yet, it doesn't sound like Haunted Chocolatier is in danger of being put on the back-burner for eternity. Barone said he's got "essentially a skeleton of the game with most (not all) of its bones in place" and has reassured fans that the game is "still going to be a thing." How soon it'll become a thing is another question, but we can always play more Stardew in the meantime. The big 1.6 update went out in March—patch notes here if you missed 'em—and by November we were at version 1.6.9, which made even more additions.
