2025: The Return of the Throwdown
After the success of the inaugural Throwdown, I continued to pursue ways to grow, starting with the initial stages of the 2025 event. Planning for the 2025 Throwdown started over the summer of 2024 and over the course of about 8 months, we created an event that improved on multiple orders of magnitude. At 2025 LAN Finals, we saw over 1800 visitors throughout the day and a peak concurrent audience size of about 450 during Maps 4 and 5.
The biggest change to the format was hosting the LAN Final at Picnic Day 2025, which is a large campus festival day that attracts over 70,000 attendees annually. We hoped that this would massively increase our day-of viewership and engagement in person, and our bet was right. Check out the theme design below:
From 2024's theme, we updated some of the standards, most notably, we made the red and blue a little brighter, giving each shade more pop. We also gave 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 anyway to better unify the brand. Take a look at some of the 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, I suppose.
The broadcast also got 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 integrated 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 (including team colors) 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:
Trinkets and Trophies
2025's event also featured a lot of new physical additions to the tournament, including a trophy and custom desk covers for each of the finalist teams. The trophy, dubbed the Pillar of Champions, is built from a solid aluminum base, laser engraved with the Champions text, and topped with a casted acrylic resin piece. In all, it cost us about $700 to manufacture and 5 weeks of work, but it was well worth it in the end. Check out some renders and build process images:
Since players would be on stage this year, we wanted each team's desk to have some more flair than just being tables, so we bought copious amounts of foam core board from Home Depot and applied printed vinyl skins to them. This did not work out as well as we would have hoped, but for this year, it at least gets the job done. We're exploring ways to achieve the same effect next year with a definitively less... bubbly texture.
LAN Finals 2025
Despite coming down with a cold two days before the event, I was still able to be on-site to set up the 2025 Throwdown LAN, which was a far more complex event. We were hosting the event in two buildings, with broadcast production in Cruess Hall and the actual match stage in California Hall - this meant the moving of tables, PCs, and more.
Setup went well into the night, and most of the crew were only able to catch a couple of hours of sleep from 5:30 AM to 8:00 AM. That being said, we woke up on Saturday morning pumped and ready to put on a great show. While initially we had our doubts about attendance, the Picnic Day crowd did not disappoint, filling California Hall's seats by Map 2. In the end, we saw over 1800 visitors come through the doors, and a great atmosphere in the match arena. Broadcast was stable throughout the day, only having one small hiccup near the start of Map 1. Otherwise, we were a well-oiled machine and the feeds came out clean for both California Hall and Twitch. Note to VOD viewers: Audio mixing in Map 1 was a bit off, but gets fixed during Map 2 and onward.
