This is an image of our high-level component architecture.  The Maestro and Calligrapher are responsible for all sound and UI in the game, respectively, and the RiftController manages all Players and Enemies in addition to its own volatility and interactions with them.  SpellTarget was a late addition, the parent class of anything (including Objective-related interactables, not pictured) which needed to react to getting hit by Spells.  Finally, the DarkMagician was still responsible for facilitating Objective and Room swapping.  This is important because of the race nature of the game; each team would always be facing their own unique instance of an Objective, including only the interactables they needed to complete it.  Further, each Objective instance needed to be designed to be played independently of, and to not interfere with, the other Objective instance currently in play.  When a team completes their current Objective, the next one should load for them, but not affect the other team's Objective (or their ability to complete it) whatsoever.  The DarkMagician, my personal masterpiece, was responsible for making all of this happen.

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A few weeks into development, I noticed the codebase becoming messier than it should have been so early, and I suggested a Code Jam to help clean it up.  The whole team got together for a massive code review, to ensure that it all adhered to our style guide and to make everyone more knowledgeable about the codebase in general.  We addressed concerns with performance and extensibility, added verbose comments and updated our release test list, and most importantly, abstracted all the in-game constants into a single reference file.  This alone took several hours, but it was well-worth it, saving us future time and hassle because of the work put in here.  The standardization also made my job of writing the SDD much easier.

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Because of all of our forethought and planning ahead, the development itself went pretty smoothly.  Our biggest problems were more "surprises" from the GMAP Team and their advisors.  We faced issues throughout the project with art asset integration, because the GMAP Team kept trying out new workflows themselves without letting us know so we could adjust our own accordingly.  Midway through the winter quarter, they requested a map rescale, which instantly rendered all of our carefully-curated in-game values for speeds, forces, and spawn locations unusable.  Thankfully, the time we had put into the Code Jam saved us here, since all of our constants were in one location and could be quickly adjusted without searching for all of them or their dependencies.  Our time could be better spent on testing the new values.  The worst headache of the whole project came when the GMAP Team lead decided that the game needed significant, large-scale changes...at the end of winter quarter, when we were supposed to be feature complete and have development all-but done.  Needless to say, we were extremely wary of the proposed changes, whether we had time to make them, and whether they were even valid at all.  We had several CS Team meetings (including one with our own advisor) to determine the most professional way to proceed.  We finally met with the GMAP Team again and were able to reach a compromise, though one that involved us giving up our spring break to get the work done and still be considered feature complete by the start of spring quarter.  But it was important to us that we maintain our good work ethic and reputation, so we did what was needed to satisfy our customer and meet our goal.