I'm back in Champaign today!
A very knowledgeable friend named Carl suggested several books on game design. One of these arrived in the mail today; Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. It's essentially a textbook which attempts to tell what game design is (tricky) and how it might be used to accomplish X,Y, and Z (very tricky). Being a game enthusiast, I've read textbook style game development books in the past. Like all textbooks, they can be very dry, or really interesting. It's to early in my reading of Rules of Play to determine which way it will turn out, but it comes highly recommended, so I'm hoping its useful.
Other then that I wrapped up the drawing part of game two today. The images are all scanned and in photoshop, ready to be dropped into their backgrounds (already in progress). Today also spelled the two-thirds mark on the game - I'm happy where I'm at in the development (about two-thirds done).
More on the book when I've had a chance to read a few chapters. Until then, here's a mystifying slice of the image I finished today;

On the Road

I'm in Telluride Colorado today, and will be in Denver this evening. One of the perks of being on the road as often as I am is that I get to occasionally visit video game development studios. Sadly I haven't found a great way to search for studios by city. I was hoping to find something to check out in Denver, but haven't had any luck yet. The search continues!
I'll be back in Champaign next week, where Nathan "The Captain" and myself will be plugging the final learning content into Voyage to the Unknown! It's looking great - we'll have a post with the updated public-facing link soon (for real this time).

Progress in Portland

I've been scratching my head all day, trying to figure out what aspect of game-making I wanted to discuss in this here blog. Since I spent the day in a bookstore which featured T-Mobil's $40 a month wireless connection fee, I went without the internet. In honor of this, here's some information on the online resources which help me out. When I can actually get to them.
Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/): Evocative name aside, this site makes a real effort to cover as broad a range of game development topics as possible. Their features section is what I've found the most use from, as its articles go into great detail.
Game Creation Resources (http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html): They update this place pretty often. Lott's of folks put a lot of hours into making programs that can make game-making easier. Links to a lot of those applications end up here.
More to come!