Elevator Orator by Le Slo
Floor 1
Create meaningless conversation as you ascend.
Floor 2
Chain words.
Floor 3
Be careful with vowels and consonants in cyan and blue lines.
Floor 4
Respect vertical letters in yellow lines.
Floor 5
Have fun!!
Floor 6
Tools:
Game Maker Studio 2
Ableton Live 10
Audacity (with the help of freesound)
Microsoft Paint
| Youtube | https://le-slo.itch.io/elevator-orator |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/elevator-orator |
Ratings
| Overall | 873th | 3.634⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1001th | 3.427⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 47th | 4.22⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 697th | 3.902⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1135th | 3.695⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 425th | 3.738⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 881th | 3.145⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 690th | 3.675⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 66🗳️ | 56🗨️ |

It's quite hard though (especially since I'm French :D) , and kinda difficult to understand which letter we should align or not.
Good job! :)
I'm just bad with words... and that's why I always take the stairs...
Love all your games and this is no exception! Took a while to get used to remembering where vowels/consonents are in words.
To be honest, idk how else the game can be better. Maybe more colours that appear the further you go?
- Aaagh, my vocabulary keeps giving me words that end with "T"!
- Wanted to type antidisestablishmentarianism, but I suppose that doesn't count as "small talk"
- Seems you can go to another tab to "pause" the game and think about your next move. I didn't take advantage of it, though!
- Sometimes, the game will start you with a mistake. Not too much of a big deal, though

- Amount of time I spent since first loading the game to get a satisfying high score: 48:01, with a score of 37!
- Words that I keep typing for some reason: owl, gear, teem, rig, ghost
Quick question : how does it work to know if a word will be understood or not ?
@ed3187 Thanks! Confusion is common in my games, but more because of negligence than design. I had very little time to make the game (I started sunday evening), so I predicted some lost players at the start!
@lairinlair Very much appreciated! And I agree with you with the non-native speaker difficulty, I'm spanish, so I'm pretty bad at the game too, hahaha.
@anoushcat Thank you for the feedback! I 100% agree with you, because I'm spanish so I sucked at the game when testing (I was afraid some bugs appeared at high scores, but as far as I know everything works fine there).
@elmos-minion Haha, thanks! FWIW, everyone gets Awkward silence at the end, it's more a highscore endless word-er runner than a game with an specific objective.
@joe-wright Thank you for your comment. You are right, that is one of the things I most regret, not giving a proper feedback (not even a SFX...) when failing to write: in a vertical line you can only have a distinct letter and you need to chain the letters, so I you have undo you could do: undO - Orbit, or unDO - DOmino, but not something like uNdo, Nothing. I hope that clarifies something! Thanks for playing!
@neuronezero Hahaha, I do take the elevator where I work, and when I'm not shy, I almost always ask the question "What's your favorite food?" It's an easy one, and always last longer than talking about the weather. Thanks for playing.
@patrik-l Thank you very much for your kind words!
@raivk Wow, very glad you liked it! My current record is 18, but I heard some people, don't want to discourage you reached 100 floors. I need to learn some english. The trick is to use small talk (short words).
@llwyd Thanks! I'll consider the phone app!
@rubyleehs Thank you for you kind words! Yeah, apart from making a bit clear the objective, the procedurality of colours could be better (I got 4 yellow bars in a row in my last run) as well as the logic of the black bars. I did think of triple letters, maybe it's possible while preventing players to write a word and then its plural, because that's basically a free floor.
@winterbeak Thanks for taking the time to write! That's an awesome score, far beyond my record. The current max are 15 letter words, I used some TXT with english words and that was all, and yes, that will be a very awkward conversation for an elevator ride! Mmm, the pause trick is interesting, I'll see what can I do about that, thanks for pointing it out! And yes that's a know bug, I changed the last minute the length of the initial word without changing the colour filler function, so that's a bummer (specially if it appears in that first five minutes of confusion!). My classic words are: sand, dome, lie and error.
@argon Very much appreciated! For the dictionary detection I had 14 files with each one all X letter words (from 2 letter words to 15 letter words), then I add them to lists at the start of the game (I have separated them because in the windows build the load time is much longer, so I could add a loading screen that changes depending on the number of letters of the words being loaded so it's not just super boring), once having that, a basic search to see if there is a specific value in the list whenever the player press accept or space and done!
@palsina Thanks for commenting! Sorry about the confusion, I tried my best with the little time I had (I only had half an hour to prepare the how to play) so it isn't clear what to do, hopefully mechanics aren't convoluted enough to let the player understand the as they play. Thank you for playing!
The choices of fonts and sounds were good. The music definitely had an elevator music feel. I liked the connection to the theme of keeping a conversation alive. But the gameplay didn't feel that much like a conversation, it's more like you're just talking to yourself. Some kind of AI that gives you words to play off of might have made it feel more conversational. Or maybe it could just be a game about talking to yourself in an elevator!
Very polished overall. You did a great job of pulling the parts together and keeping the theme cohesive.
took me AGES to figure how to play, but once i did... i've been playing a while O.O
i LOVE this! I think the tutorial was pretty confusing though. I appreciate the minimal tutorial screen, but it took me a while to realize the main game loop was, "pick a letter from the previous word to start with, and then type a new word, and hit enter to go down a floor and start a new word. The new word should follow four rules:
1. consonants go on blue
2. vowels go on cyan
3. letters in the same column have to match
4. you MUST use letters in yellow columns
.. although that's pretty verbose so idk. maybe just a gif showing somebody playing a few words?
I'm going to keep playing this for a while I bet. :D Thanks!
