As I'm having technical difficulties in drawing out the blueprints for the layout of the school building where the character is currently located, I thought I'd go back to trying to share and illustrate the concept going old-school and using ASCII art for the layout.

First, let's take a look at the center of the building where the characters are located. This is a massive five floor building, with a central lobby on each floor where the stairs and elevators are located. Picture the lobby area to be like the following:

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The @ would represent the basic walkable area around the central core of the building, and that space in the central area is an open air view which one can peer over and see all the way to the ground floor if they choose to.

Now, let's let "S" represent the placement of the STAIRS and "E" represent the placement of the ELEVATORS around that central lobby area.

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As you can see, the central area has 4 sets of stairs and elevators which go down to the lower levels.

Now, from this central core area of the building, we have 4 main hallways which go off in the cardinal directions -- North, South, East, and West, like so:

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(Note that these aren't supposed to be in any sort of scale, so kindly don't imagine they are. These are just to help you conceptualize the basic layout of the school itself.)

Now, off from these main hallways, we have branching hallways which are fairly evenly spaced apart, like so: (Note, I'm only going to space the south hallway, but picture a mirror type layout for all the halls.)

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These sub-halls are further separated by individual hallways as well, which would be represented in the following manner (again, only a partial layout so extrapolate the concept to the whole building.)

Hallway continues up to center.

/This is only the last 2 sub-halls.

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Now, the above represents the hallways of the last two sub-halls (if that makes any sense.)

Now, the far south hallways are placed semi-close together. This is simply to maximize floor space, as there's no sub-hallways from the next cross-hallway interspaced between them as we see with the relationship between the first East-West hall and the second one.

Now, where those hallways are, picture a room coming off from them on both the East and West sides. On the farthest south running passages, the rooms would be separate and unconnected. For the cross-section between the 2 main East-West hallways, the rooms would be adjoining to each other and you could travel between them.

And where is our intrepid hero at this moment in time you ask?

In the far, far south end of the building, on the far, far right side. The stairs to the rooftop were placed in the most out of the way area that the designers of the building could come up with specifically to help avoid student access (not that it'll ever stop a truly determined person from going where they want.)

In the middle of that last North-South hall, on the East side, back in one of the out of the way corners of the building, is one of the teacher's lounges for female teachers, and it's at the doorway of this room where our main character finds himself. (The far West side has a mirroring teacher's lounge for male teachers.)

Now someone will say, "That's a huge ass building!", and they'd be correct. This was built as an international, culturally aware and diverse building. The students that attend here are (generally speaking), the children of foreign diplomats and politicians, with many very wealthy students added to the mixture as their parents thought it'd make an excellent place for them to make connections with other influential people. There's also people, like our main character, who won scholarships or a "lottery" to attend the school, so it could represent a cross-section of all the people.

Since the character was one of the first who was lucky enough to attend the school, the building is currently only 1/4 occupied and already houses 10,000 students. (Everyone is in the same freshman class. Next year would've been a new class of freshmen while the current class would be sophomores, and about 1/2 the classrooms would be used.) Average class size is variable, but usually quite small. These students are used to having individual and small student count classes. Some may simply host a single student being privately tutored by an instructor, and some may host up to 10 or 12 students max in them at a time.

It's a BIG building, the main character is off all the way down to the farest corner of the building, and he has to make his way to the center before he can leave. To do that, he'd do North from his present position to the next hallway which he could take West, from which he'd then have to take the main central hallway North to the main central area with the steps and elevators... All without disturbing the creatures which might be lurking or watching from all those classrooms or hallways which he'd pass trying to get there.

I hope that helps people visualize where the character is at in relation to the rest of the building, and the difficult of the task which he's going to have to overcome if he wants to leave this place.

If you guys have any questions about the building, layout, or anything in general, feel free to ask me about it here. Consider this thread to be one of those nice Author Q-&-A's you see sometimes. I won't give away anything that I feel might be spoilerish, but I will try and respond and fill in any blanks or questions that people may have about the setting, character backgrounds, or anything else really. ;)

And, even though it has nothing to do with the school design or what not, I thought I'd go ahead and post the reasoning behind the chapter format here for everyone, as the short chapter size seems to be a concern for some people.

01/12/2015 02:26:42dwoolfy Wrote: [ -> ]

So far I have found the story to be rather fun. I have no preferences on your poll, but one thing that is irritating to me is how short each of your chapters are. I prefer something a bit more substantial, not just in length but in substance. Each of your chapters seems to be telling about a small short event. I think it would probably be better if you had your chapter events consist of more than what they are currently. Otherwise I definitely am enjoying the concept.

01/12/2015 02:34:29Thinktank Wrote: [ -> ]I second this!

I'd rather have a longer chapter every 2 or 3 days rather than two or three a day.

I think I explained somewhere once before, but I'll go over the reason for the short chapters once again for everyone. ;)

Basically, I've got a nice long bullet list full of a plot outline which basically describes how I'd like to see the story progress. To give an example, it's something similar to the following:

Basic info on setting.

Introduce main character briefly and the crack.

Kill main character. Introduce concept of spirit self.

Revive main character again. Introduce concept of rebirth cycle.

Kill main character. Introduce concept of stats and skills.

Revive main character. Introduce concept of basic game mechanics. (non-moveable areas, levels)

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Each of those little bullets (though a little more simplified than what I actually use) corresponds with one of the "Chapters " as I've been sharing them here. The chapters are simply an easy way for me to keep my notes and story all organized neatly together. Honestly, I should probably label them as something different so that there isn't any confusion as to what they actually represent (maybe "Chaplets" would be appropriate) , but I figure that's something I can wrap up all nice and neatly later.

In the future, I hope to wrap the story up nice and cleanly in an EPUB format, and when I do that the "Chapters" will be consolidated and actually become full chapters and not just "mini-chapters". For instance, what are basically chapter 0 - 4 now would be packaged together and become The Prolog (They all describe the background and introduce concepts). What are currently chapters 5 - 14 would go together to become Chapter 1 (The start of the main character's journey of discovery as he attempts to learn the rules of the new reality).

The main advantage for me right now, is the current mini-format is keeping everything lined up so it's easier to keep stuff organized and in sync.

The secondary advantage is it reduces the burden as I slowly adjust to learning the format for the forums and such. Believe it or not, this is my very first attempt to post a work-in-progress to a forum like this one, and I keep running into issues on the technical side of things. I'm expanding on my BBC knowledge. I'm learning how to format the text so that it looks all nice and neat like I want it to, and I'm trying not to burden myself with learning too much too fast. I want to focus on the story itself, moreso than I do on having to learn BBC code just to keep it looking somewhat similar to the .doc file that I'm keeping at home for my personal track of story progress.

But, even with all that said and explained, I still have a feeling that the chapters are going to start growing in length more and more all the time. After all, there is an additional character being introduced into the story now, and that's going to introduce dialog, character interactions, and multiple reactions to story events which will make each segment a little longer to tell and also give me a chance to expand onto things in a little more detail.

Some authors produce 10,000 words in one single chapter and update it every two or three days. At the moment, my little chaplets are about 1500 words each, but I'm producing them at a rate of about 5 a day. In the long run, the amount of words end up the same. The only real difference is in the delivery method. Slower release times with bigger chapters, or faster release times with smaller "chaplets"; in the end, they both get to the same destination. and hopefully tell the story the author is trying to convey. ;)