Phase 1 - Day 1.

This is the only building that I'd really need in order to feel comfortable to release my creation to the Gen Con world - the Indianapolis Convention Center.

Aerial map of the convention area. Ideally I'd be able to create everything in color, but just ICC (in red) is truly necessary. Note to self: Lucas Oil Stadium will NOT be built on the diagonal. I don't hate myself that much.

For Day One I am researching the dimensions of ICC - which is... hard.

​I've found a floor plan on the ICC site but the room dimensions are all fancy pop-up boxes instead of a nice flat map. In addition, it has no dimensions of the various walkways.

SUPER not interested in clicking on every box and manually adding together dimensions. On to attempt #2.

Whyyyyyy

Still no dimensions but at least I feel like I could use this as a good jumping off point for the interior design...

ICC website you're killing me! I've looked through the entire thing and can't find something as simple as a pdf with some dimensions.

I did find a DWG file - so maybe? 

Success!

It's not quite as simple as a PDF but I can use Autodesk Viewer with this DWG file to get all the measurements I need! I double-checked room 128 and it is indeed 31.5 feet wide on the ICC floor plan with pop-ups. So I am ready to get rocking and rolling!

The convention center at its widest is 1333 feet and longest is 964 feet. Each block in Minecraft is 3 feet, so ICC alone will be 444 x 321. While designing, I will need to be careful with rounding and making sure everything is adding up to that total. There will be some "fudging" involved or else I might end up being 20 blocks short/long because everything has been rounded down/up.

Another consideration is that the walls in ICC are definitely NOT 3 feet wide. So I will need to add that into my numbers as well. For rooms 125-128, in order to hit the correct dimensions I'll need to make sure the distance is 42 blocks for 5 walls plus the remaining interior - so with 37 blocks between 4 rooms, three rooms will be 9 blocks and one will be 10 blocks despite what the measurement of 31.5 feet implies. This means that I have to choose between doorways being the same size, doorways being centered in the room, or possibly just cheating and having a double wall instead of a 10 block wide room.

Insert Minecraft Villager "hmm" here

I'll break down the building into sections like this, planning for "flex" space to make up any differences - most likely the hallways.

Time to bust out the grid paper! I'll be using Google Sheets as my digital version. ​