That arc makes sense. Music slowing down while the game dev moves to the front is a familiar shape.
On the handoff problem the thing that helped us most was recording the verb rather than the noun. Our state files describe what each thing IS and that wasn't enough to resume from. What a session was in the middle of and what it meant to do next is the part that goes missing between agents.
We keep a playbook per venue for the same reason. Rules drift and a stale rule is worse than no rule.
Good luck with the spin up.