The film I am adapting into a game is Le Squellete Joyeux, a film by the Lumiere Brothers from 1898. It depicts a skeleton dancing on a stage, jumping around, kicking its legs and swinging its arms. From time to time it will collapse and the limbs will dance seperate from the torso. I came across this film first while looking up some of the earliest horror films (though this is more spooky than horrifying) and when I saw this I was oddly amused. Something about it bouncing around elicits a kind of simple pleasure, it's just genuinely kind of silly and I really liked it.
My idea for a game is a fairly simplistic dancing game where arrows descend from the top of the screen and you press arrow keys to "hit" them and make the skeleton dance. These would be the up, down and side arrowns. There may or may not be music (I'm thinking Spooky Scary Skeletons). There would be three levels of varying difficulty. If you fail to hit the arrows the skeleton gradually loses body parts until he is nothing but a head and you lose. If you continue to hit the correct arrows then the skeleton begins to gain body parts, organns, skin, and eventually clothes until it resembles a living human again. You would either win when the sekelton is complete or if you survive the whole song (or time limit depending). I propose using simple keys to reflect the simplicity of the original film and make a game that is simple to enjoy and perhaps silly in the same way. I could imagine implementing some kind of sysytem besides just the arrow keys for dancing wherein if you lose you have to hop around as a head using another input system and collect your bones so you can play again. However, this futher complicates a game that I think could benefit from being fairly plain.
