During May 2021-June 2021, I had the opportunity to organize DrenchedProgram along with Nyanaro. It was a two-day tournament, and the prize pool was $10,000 (paid by Charlie / MoistCrit1kal). My main responsibility was the graphics, along with operating the infrastructure (i.e. verification, bots). I also had a minor role in bot development and sheets, whereas LeoFLT (a very skilled person) did most of the work in those departments.
Design + Stream
Throughout the tournament, we used the stable branch of the tournament client instead of lazer, since Charlie was understandably streaming on his Twitch himself. There were some audio issues that required a map redownload and tournament client restart.
We also replaced the Exo 2 player names in the client by our own name cards. I have done this for various tournaments in the past. If you want to do this, I suggest utilizing Photoshop’s Variables feature to create JPEG files of the player names. This involves designing a template a photoshop, defining variables for applicable layers, and importing a dataset for values.
Nyanaro came up of the bouncing DVD idea which worked very well. We used an OBS plugin [dvd screensaver | OBS Forums (obsproject.com)] which worked exactly as intended, minus a few quirks while setting it up.
Infrastructure
Regarding infrastructure, we had two things running. First thing that we had was a bot which linked Discord users to their osu! username, and in the process dragged them into the server. The project that we self-hosted was [Coderbora/osuturkiye: osu!türkiye (github.com)]. I ran into a few problems, but the author of the project provided magnificent support (for free!).
I did learn that LeoFLT made a sign-up sheet for 1v1 tournaments specifically (osu! OAuth2 Sign-up Sheet Template (Solo) – Google Sheets) which is an integrated signup and verification solution. Definitely something to use for my next 1v1 tournament.
Second thing, as written earlier, we wrote a bot that integrated with Google Sheets. It handled the entire qualifier signups (players & refs). The player list is from the spreadsheet, while the lobby times are provided in a json file. One could say it was overengineered, but it was very nice to work on the project. I did have some but not much experience with JS before, so this was a nice refresher. This said, though, there is no doubt at all that Leo is much more proficient than me and he worked on the majority of the project, and I learned a lot from working with him.
Closing thoughts
Overall, I was very happy that the tournament turned out to be fairly successful, and Charlie was delighted with how it turned out. As it was a two-day tournament, it was fairly stressful especially when the tournament date was edging closer and closer, particularly because there’s definitely pressure to do well. All those hours spent in Photoshop resulted in something meaningful at the end.
Could some parts of the tournament have turned out better? Sure, but mainly everyone would agree that our audience was quite casual, which were reflected in the mappools and commentary.
During the streams, I believe that the maximum concurrent viewer count was more than 16,000 people. Talk about having your graphics seen by that much people…
Anyway, that’s all from me. I’m very grateful for everyone who made it happen, especially Nyanaro, LeoFLT, and Charlie himself, not to mention all the players and staff. Maybe there will or will not be a sequel, who knows…
