Haunted Chocolatier

Like Stardew Valley, the game centers on settling into a new town and getting to know its residents, but the player's livelihood comes from a chocolate shop in a haunted castle rather than from a farm. Barone has described it as more of an action role-playing game than Stardew Valley. He has confirmed that romantic relationships will feature, as in Stardew Valley. He has said that the core of the game is a loop of collecting ingredients, producing chocolate, and managing the shop, and that there is more to the game than that.

Chocolate can be made in several ways, ranging from an intuition-driven method to more conventional, mechanical ones, and Barone has said that there will be reasons to use each. The announcement trailer also showed the player customizing the shop, with options such as different countertop styles, and displaying chocolates for sale while ghosts carry chocolates around the room.

Barone began work on Haunted Chocolatier in 2020, after the commercial success of Stardew Valley. He worked on the game in secret for more than a year before announcing it, and, as with Stardew Valley, intended it to be a solo project.

In April 2023, Barone announced a pause on the game to work on the 1.6 update to Stardew Valley. That update had been planned as a largely technical release to improve modding support, to be handled by others, but his involvement led to a much larger amount of new content, and subsequent bug fixing and porting work kept him away from Haunted Chocolatier. In December 2024, he wrote that he was returning to the game. Before the pause he had built a vertical slice, an early version of the game with most, though not all, of its major components in place. By spring 2025, he said, his responsibilities from the 1.6 update had subsided, leaving him more time for the game.