Haunted Chocolatier, the next game from Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone, is still in early development. As with in-progress Stardew updates, though, Barone likes to share little tastes of what he’s working on now and then, and over the holiday he posted a few screenshots of the candy shop and town sim. This time we’ve been treated to some especially fresh chocolate-concocting ghosts and a school bus turned vegetable plot.
Barone wants to keep things close to the chest with Chocolatier, but said on December 25 that he doesn’t want to be totally silent while he works. “I still want to check in and let you all know that I am working on this game all the time and making progress,” he wrote.
As he mentioned when first announcing the game, Barone said that there are still a lot of core elements of Chocolatier to work on. He wants to keep plenty of surprises for launch, but let’s see what we can puzzle out from these sweet new screens.
Previously in the reveal trailer, we saw some rather cute ghosts assisting the player with setting up their chocolate shop before customers arrived for the day. It looks like your ghostly pals will be helping out in the chocolate labs, too. Unlike the mansion’s kitchen we’ve gotten a peek at, it looks like this room is meant for a bit of experimentation. Two item slots on the table in the center might be used for synthesizing ingredients of some kind.
On January 1, Barone posted two more screenshots: a spooky-looking house on a snowy hill and a school bus whose roof has been turned into a garden plot. It looks like the inside of that bus might have been converted too—maybe into a shop? Curious!
Barone’s Christmas day post also includes a few character portrait expressions for Burk, the weaponsmith we saw in Chocolatier’s reveal trailer.
Those are all just guesses of course, and as Barone warned in his post about Haunted Chocolatier’s combat in October, things are still subject to change as development continues. There’s neither a release date nor year for Chocolatier yet, so we’ll need to keep being patient while these sweets temper.