Hello!
After the pleasure and honor of directing this wonderful film for Beefeater x Jamiroquai, I felt the urge to make something more of my own. So let me introduce you to this slightly crazy project I've been working hard on in the evenings: a video game adapted from that little props asset seen inside the TV in the film we made together.
A jump runner with a rogue-lite approach.
Jay Kay's Hat Hop is a nervy, addictive jumping game, spiced up with a real dose of strategy.
The principle is immediate: you jump from platform to platform (giant hats), you chain them together, you go as far as possible. A run wraps up in a few minutes, but it can stretch much longer for try-harders chasing the perfect run. All along the way, you collect shiny discs scattered across the levels, the game's currency, sometimes positioned to lure you onto a risky trajectory.
Between each level, you reach a shop
where you spend these coins to gear up: hats, which stack on Jay Kay's head and combine their effects (they're what shapes your build), and cards, which alter the rules of the next level (bigger platforms, more powerful jumps, denser terrain; you buy yourself some ease, or you decide to take the challenge as it comes).
On top of that come the Beefeater bottles, a precious consumable.
On death, each one lets you keep an element of your run. It's the engine of keep & retry, the heart of the rogue-lite loop. You keep part of your progress, you relaunch, and you push a little further with each attempt. Failure is never an ending: it's a step.
A PS1 aesthetic
an ode to the late 90s
The visual identity draws straight from the late 1990s, the golden age of the first PlayStation: angular low-poly, shimmering textures, thick fog, dirty colors, and that distinctive CRT grain. Beyond nostalgia, this style carries real game design power: its imperfection leaves room for the imagination. Where an ultra-sharp render shows everything, an approximate texture and a barely suggested silhouette invite the brain to fill in the rest. That's what gave the games of that generation their charm and mystery, and Hat Hop fully embraces it. It's also a direct nod to the film: the game is literally born from that little asset glimpsed in the TV during our shoot, like a forgotten cartridge brought back to life.
And that era is also Jamiroquai's: for anyone who spent their afternoons in front of MTV with a bowl of cereal, "Virtual Insanity" and the PS1 belong to the same world.
Brand integration
Do (jump) more.
The brand isn't slapped on top of the game: it's an integral part of it. The Beefeater bottle is already a gameplay object in its own right; it's what lets you "keep" part of your progress to relaunch (the core of keep & retry). From there, we can go much further: wording and styling of the menus, objects and sets in the brand's colors, themed environments or events, skins. And above all, the leaderboard opens the door to very real rewards for the best players (prizes, access, experiences around the Beefeater x Jamiroquai universe), which turns a simple run into a true brand competition. Everything stays deliberately flexible and modular according to your wishes; it's exactly the kind of thing we can imagine and build together.
A prototype that's already addictive
Join the leaderboard !
The best thermometer is the field: I had the crew on our current shoot test the prototype, and a lot of people play it spontaneously between takes. For a project at this stage, that's the most precious feedback there is. I plugged in a leaderboard to create a little competition, and the effect is immediate. That's exactly the bar I want to hold: a game that's immediate and replayable, that you pick up in five seconds without reading anything, but that hides real depth for those who want to dig in: optimizing your build, finding the best combinations of hats and cards to go ever further.
What I'm planning for V1
Deliverable: a game playable online in browsers (Chrome, Safari, iPhone, Android).
Refine the balancing
for a fair, nervy difficulty curve.
Enrich visual variety
Biomes, a day/night cycle, and other elements (weather, etc.) that add more hook and variety to the screen.
Create more hats and cards
To enrich builds and sessions, and multiply the viable strategies for going far (already the case, but we push the cursor).
Improve the sound design
Addictive games always have a deeply crafted SD, the kind you love to hear, that gives the game its tangibility and feel.
To test: add a musical dimension to the game
add a musical dimension to the game, with bonuses that trigger when you chain several jumps on a snare or a kick. On paper it's a real bit of originality; it remains to be validated that it's technically feasible in a game running in a browser.
Refining all the text content in collaboration with you
going through every line of copy and menu wording together, until the tone is exactly right.
Testing and fixing bugs
continuous playtesting to track down and squash what's left.
Going further
Native iOS and Android versions
for a full-screen experience and optimal performance.
Jay Kay skins
to customize the character.
Pushed replayability
with a login system, we can imagine unlockable bonuses that "stay" saved from one run to the next; the game becomes even more replayable and builds real long-term progression.
Every good idea is welcome — I take feedback from all the testers.
