The Tower Menace

Today we had our very first play-test. I played against Martijn and it was a good match. Before I tell you this wonderful story of our splendid Tower Defence adventures I'll tell you what we have (that was, without a doubt, the most beautiful sentence I've ever made).

We've got a basic tower defence, one type of enemy, one type of tower. Martijn remade the entire map to be perfectly balanced (unlike the sloppy-made-within-5-minutes-test map) and just before our testing revision I programmed the entire gold system. That was basically everything we needed! We had been postponing the gold system (Towers cost gold to build) for testing purposes, you see, having no restrictions means easier testing. Before we could play a "balanced" game we had to fix that though. The game wouldn't be half as much fun if every player could make infinite amounts of towers at the first wave.
With the gold system in place we thought we would be pretty much ready for a play test, we have never been so wrong. During our first test we found out that our towers pretty much confused their enemies. The towers that I built were actually helping Martijn instead of me! Time for a quickfix, and lets go onto test #2. In test two we put the gold system to a test. It wasn't as solid as it was supposed to be. Whenever someone built a tower his gold was reduced, but the limit didn't quite seem to work. Result? Still building infinite towers with a negative amount of gold. Time for a... wait for itttt... QUICKFIX! We quickly found the source of this problem (Siemen had apparently accidentally broken the gold limit system while implementing the health-bars for enemies), and it was fixed, though we still have no idea how health-bars and gold limits have any connection...  Martijn coudn't resist building infinite amounts of towers, so we had to start over again, since the match was no longer balanced.
You guessed it, we fixed the little bug and and went on to test #3. Test three was a more of a balancing test. We didn't find any more bugs, so we went on and did a little bit of balancing. We didn't want to do the balancing already, but it seemed inevitable. Killing units didn't reward enough gold, towers had too much range, it all really broke the gameplay.
We did find one critical mistake though. If one player doesn't send any units, the other player will not get any money. There are two possible ways to fix this. Option one: force people to send a minimum amount of units, or make an income system that rewards players if they send units. We chose to implement the last one, but it will take some time to get it all working. We basically added another point to our todo-list, while we were finally getting near the bottom. Thank the gods we did this play-test now, and not three days before release!

And finally, we will conclude this long reading with the happy announcement that we have our first version of the animated logo. The guy who originally had the job has abandoned it, and I have taken it. The 3D animations are done, all it needs now is sound. But sorry, you're not getting to see it yet, since it looks really stupid without sound. And unfortunately, the logo has no priority over coding...