Chucklefish, the developer behind Starbound and publisher of Stardew Valley, is taking some inspiration from the latter for one of its next games. Aside from the Advance Wars-inspired game it's working on, the publisher-studio told us in January that it's creating "an RPG/Sim set in a magic school, something like Stardew Valley meets Harry Potter."
Today, Chuckefish CEO Finn Brice tweeted a peek at the game, stating that they've "learned a lot of lessons from working with Stardew."
It isn't a lot to go on, but based on the quaint cafe and witch hat sporting kids on the left of the image, it looks like a pixel art rendition of Little Witch Academia. If that's at all an accurate description of what Chucklefish is up to, I'm absolutely here for it. The 'art style demonstration' video from October of last year also looks promising.
Chucklefish is currently working with Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone on adding multiplayer to Stardew, and beta testing for that should begin at the end of the year, according to a recent update. There's been no mention of Barone being involved with any Chucklefish-developed games, so for now we'll assume this magic RPG is simply taking inspiration from Stardew Valley, which of course took its inspiration from Harvest Moon. Around and around we go.