The elevator replaces the portal
A boss portal became an elevator ride between acts. The first version put character portraits on the walls and lasted a few hours, until the owner asked to see the selected character standing in an actual elevator. The frame is built, and the story that rides in it is still being written.
Written up later from the repo's history and dated to the days it describes.
For most of Earfh's life, getting from the act hub to the boss was a portal. You stood in a doorway and a boss level loaded. It worked, and it said nothing, so the elevator started as a request for the hand-off between acts to carry some of the story.
Seven rides
The ride that landed on October 18 is a small state machine with a door, a cab and an arrival. There are seven rides in a data file, one for each hand-off, and the first time you see each one it cannot be skipped. Later viewings can be. The portal's job is now the elevator's job, and the act breaks go through it.
The first presentation was built around the dialogue. The owner's idea was an 80s anime treatment, so the layout had portraits on the side walls, title cards and letterbox bars.
The cab
About forty minutes after the anime idea arrived, the owner sent a picture and said the middle of the screen should show the selected character in an actual elevator. The portraits-on-walls layout was replaced before it had been seen outside a smoke test.
The cab that came out of that has your character standing in it, with speech bubbles above whoever is talking. It also has a directory of floors on the wall, a certificate on the wall that says it expired in 1994 and allows 8 persons, a radio, a PA monitor and a camera dome in the ceiling. All of it is there to make the ride read as a place.
What is not here
The ride is built. The story that rides in it is not. The seven rides are data waiting on a script, and a first pass of text-only scenes is in review. Hub conversations, the cast's lines in the cab and any recorded voice are all still ahead, so what a player sees today is an elevator with the lights on and not much said inside it.
What is next
The scripts, then the voices.