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;