Mission:
As with every new project, a brand is necessary to get started - the Throwdown brand identity grew off the Esports at UC Davis brand, taking similar font facts and utilizing Moogie, our mascot, for the logo. We included a new font style, Hyperwave One, to represent the grittier feel that the word "Throwdown" elicits. To match this identity, a few relatively bright shades of red, yellow, and aqua were chosen to be the main palette of the event, but as will later become apparent, the color palette is largely irrelevant in an event where we allowed 24 teams to pick their own team colors.
Check out a collection of event-related graphics below:
Broadcast:
One of our main priorities with this event was to ensure a professional broadcast experience for our viewers - both during the online qualifier stage and the LAN Final event. We noticed that the broadcast production side of collegiate esports has historically been significantly lacking, and we wanted to avoid making the same mistake. A poor broadcast experience negates nearly any other positive aspect of an event, so it was critical we get it right.
We developed in-house systems for the Agent Select, pre-game, and post-game flows and made some slick motion graphics to pair with the tech. Most of the data shown on screen in graphics is live-updated from a Google Sheet, with some exceptions like the Agent Select stinger being pre-rendered elements. Overall, we were quite happy with the broadcast setup, but we'll be making some changes in 2025 that I'll discuss later in this page.
Check out the event VOD for the 2024 LAN Event below. This VOD begins at map 2 - we had a small technical bug that froze the stream immediately after map 1 and split the VOD into separate recordings.
In-person Event:
Check out a photo reel of the in-person LAN Final event, including the broadcast setup, signage, and more:
2025: The Return of the Throwdown
We obviously couldn't just stop at one event, the first one was a ton of fun and we had many improvements we felt were achievable. Planning for the 2025 Throwdown started over the summer of 2024 and we are currently in full-swing development for all the assets we'll need! We've gathered a much larger sponsor base and prize pool this year, and we'll be improving nearly every aspect of the event.
The biggest news in all of this is that we'll be hosting the LAN Final at Picnic Day 2025, which is a large campus festival day that attracts over 70,000 attendees annually. We're hoping that this will massively increase our day-of viewership and engagement in-person. Check out the theme design below:
From 2024's theme, we updated some of the standards - most notably, we've made the red and blue a little brighter, giving each shade more pop. We've also given each competition stage its own logo, and updated the LAN Final logo. Finally, we swapped out the block font for Product Sans, a change that is unlikely to make much of a difference since we rarely use block fonts, but was made anyways to better unify the brand. Take a look at some of the early asset renders below:
Keen-eyed viewers of my site may have noticed that the flag render from Robot Reveal 2023 has returned - I never felt that the Reveal 2023 render lived up to its full potential - it was rendered out at about 1/4 the framerate we needed, so most of the frames were dynamically generated with Premiere. This resulted in weird movement that while hard to notice on a big screen from far away, became apparent when viewing the assets on your own computer. The render for the 2025 Throwdown has improved physics realism (the old flags behaved like one big jello block) and much-improved framerate - we rendered out 1100 frames and generated an additional 300-400, compared to Reveal 2023 which rendered 180 frames and generated another 500 or so. The final result is an asset that I'm finally confident to include in digital deliverables. Reveal 2023 had renders in digital deliverables, but they were static renders that had much better fidelity than the motion renders. You can think of Throwdown 2025's flags as a redemption run of sorts, in a way.
The broadcast is also getting some major upgrades - over the summer, the EaUCD prod team and I were contracted to stream parts of the Summer Splash VALORANT tournament, and we tested a new instant-replay tech stack there. It proved to be largely successful, so we're integrating it into the Throwdown tech stack for 2025. Additionally, using some creative masking and extra OBS plugins, we are happy to announce that all graphics data on stream is now fully dynamic, pulled from a live Google Sheet that anyone on the staff team can update! Check out some early test renders below, as well as a replay demo from Summer Splash:
I'll update after the 2025 LAN with more media from our event! In the meantime, make sure to follow EaUCD on socials to stay up to date with the Throwdown!