Stardew Valley's creator thinks he will "always have a desire to come back and maybe add a thing or two", so we can probably expect to wait for Haunted Chocolatier for a while longer

I would not mind if these two games worked like Guild Wars 1 campaigns: you can play them separately as standalone games, but if you install both, they act as one game and you can play with the characters from one game in the maps with the other.

Gamers are so fucking toxic that they will get enraged and call out a solo developer for saying they'll probably never fully abandon their beloved first game because that clearly means he won't work hard enough on making them their new game which they've literally never played before.