Two feet on the ground

Having safely arrived in San Francisco on Monday night, I spent the majority of yesterday getting everything established on my laptop. Nathan and I had cause to use the WebX tool yesterday, and after some initial confusion we were both able to "draw" on the screen. The goal is that I won't have to pick up the phone every time I want to communicate an idea, and it looks like chat and WebX are going to do the trick.
At this stage i'm completing the written descriptions of the games various visuals. Here's a sweet example:

Node A: Crash sight
Image A1: Crash landed spaceship in a jungle – it appears to have plowed through an alien statue on it’s way down.

- An opening in the ships hull extends off to the left (mouse-over (MO) brings up an arrow pointing left) (Image A1)

- A grown-over pathway in the jungle leads off to the right (MO shows an arrow to the right) (Image B)

- Broken-off, blinking headlamp (animated GIF)

- A piece of fallen statue is here

- A teleport platform is here (MO lightening bolt symbol)

Once this document is completed, thumbnail images like the one below will be drawn to match the descriptions. The thumbnails will serve as the first draft for the art in the game. Once all are completed, we can drop these rough images into HTML and actually start testing the game out. When we've determined everything is visually making sense, work on final images can begin.
A few games back we just kind of hit the ground running and came up with ideas on the fly. While this was a very exciting way to work, we didn't really have a "game" until the very end - in our case the day before we launched. It's our hope that planning ahead and thoroughly testing the product will make the process a lot smoother for everyone involved.
I'm off to UC Berkeley later today to see the campus and get some drawings done.