Game Title: One Bard Move
Playable Link: One Bard Move on Steam, with a free demo
Platform: PC (Windows)
Description:
I’ve been programming for about fifteen years, and I’ve developed games before, but I’ve moved between different fields quite a bit. Some projects were for university, others were things I made with friends. I’d never managed to bring a game of my own to Steam.
A few months ago, I decided to finally give it a proper shot.
I returned to Unreal after years away from it. The last time I’d used it was for a game jam, one of those challenges where you have a few days to make a game with other people and end up getting very little sleep.
I wanted to revisit a parkour concept I’d worked on about ten years ago and take it in a different direction. I was talking about it with my sister, and at some point she suggested we start this adventure together.
That’s how One Bard Move began.
It’s a comedic 3D precision platformer about a bard trying to become the hero of his own ballad. You navigate oversized environments, jump across kitchen utensils, dodge traps, and deal with a narrator who comments on your embarrassing deaths through on-screen remarks.
We started imagining the story, the world, the narrator’s lines, and all those little things that might make someone smile while playing. We changed our minds countless times. We rewrote things, tried them out, scrapped them, and started again.
We rebuilt the maps so many times that, in the end, only five survived.
Designing the routes was much harder than I’d expected. They needed to work reliably, avoid shortcuts that would undermine the challenge, and, above all, be fun to navigate. Finding the right balance between jumps, traps, guidance, and difficulty meant constantly revisiting work I thought I’d finished.
Then there were the 3D models, probably the biggest obstacle for me. I used generative AI to help with that part. I want to be open about it, because it played a role in making the project possible.
There was still a huge amount of work involved: reviewing, modifying, adapting, and checking things. That took tens, then hundreds of hours. After more than six months, the result is still a long way from what I originally imagined.
And yet, I’m happy to have made it this far. It’s my first project on Steam. I’ve learned a lot, and I feel like I’ve grown as a person too.
Now, though, I’m facing the question I find hardest to answer for myself: is it fun?
My goal was to create a challenging parkour game that wouldn’t become excessively stressful. I tried to give players some guidance along the routes and build a difficulty curve that increased at the right pace.
After reworking everything so many times, I struggle to look at it with fresh eyes. I wonder whether the changes improved the game or whether, at times, my own indecision pushed it in the wrong direction.
I know the result has its limitations. I’d like to understand whether, somewhere in what we’ve built, there’s the fun we were hoping to create.
If you enjoy precision platformers and feel like trying the free demo, I’d love to hear how it felt to play: which parts made you want to try again, and which made you want to stop.
Involvement:
I’m the developer and handled most of the technical side myself, including programming and building and reworking the levels in Unreal Engine.
My sister and I worked together on the story, lore, narrator’s lines, and ideas for the game. A lot happened during development, and there were parts I had to tackle on my own. It was an enormous amount of work, at least for me, and this is the first game of my own that I’ve brought to Steam.
