Gorilla Report #1: Volan '25

Over the past few months the Tennessee Gorilla has been working to cultivate a unique and innovative live-stream experience with one event in mind. This was Volan, the University of Tennessee's yearly eSports event. This event has historically been Knoxville's biggest Super Smash Bros. (Smash) tournament. However, over the past few months, the Knoxville Smash tournaments had seen a sharp decline in attendants, and enthusiasm for the scene was waning. There was a high amount of concern for the future of the scene.

The Tennessee Gorilla arose out of a desire to revitalize the local scene by improving the tournament experience, and also purely of the ambition that inspires any sort of artistic project. The Tennessee Gorilla believes that by improving the experience of viewing and attending our tournaments, we would incentivize players to show up, bring their friends, and even visit from neighboring cities. On top of just growing the scene, we wanted to help shape the tone of Knoxville tournaments in order to cultivate an environment that is both more fun and healthy for individuals within the scene.

The Tennessee Gorilla's primary method of achieving these goals was to produce a Twitch Stream that provides a window for people not currently present to look in and view what we are doing. On top of just opening up the gameplay to viewers, we are also able to use the stream to enhance the viewing experience for attendees; by putting the stream on projectors throughout the tournament venue, we have created a space where spectating the event is possible without having to crowd behind one monitor.

The Gorilla's Theatrics

Now, if we just streamed gameplay to Twitch, put it on a projector, and called it a day, we wouldn't have much to report. The Tennessee Gorilla instead set out to do more. Combining skillsets of graphic design, video editing, software development, and the miscellaneous other artistic and technical skills we have, we worked to deliver a premier viewing experience.

Gorilla Stream Helper

We did this by using (and customizing) the open-source tool, Tournament Stream Helper(TSH). This tool enabled us to scrape tournament pages for information about the players that they made public and to display it on stream using HTML files added to OBS as a browser source. If that sounds complicated, essentially it lets us build stream scenes that automatically display player information such as this one:

These enable us to present in-depth information about the ongoing match in a Gorilla-approved way, and fill downtime with information that viewers both at the venue and watching over the internet would find helpful. For example, when downtime permits, we have a scene that displays the current state of a tournament's bracket.

The ability to present the bracket on stream has been immensely helpful for the Tournament Organizers, as before a tournament officially starts, they can ask The Gorilla to display the bracket on the venues projectors and allow players to look at their tournament path in advance.

From there, we played around with ideas about how we can present player information on stream. The program came bundled with template layouts we could use, for example the scene displayed above is built off a modified form of one of those templates. However, it was rare that one of those perfectly fit within our vision for the stream. So many of the scenes used for our stream were custom-built for Knoxville streams.

For example, we modified a template for a 'PlayerPresentation' scene that would display players tournament results to instead display custom custom-curated list of 'Fun Facts' about the player. This change was made in accordance with the Gorilla's goal of helping players value aspects of the community beyond just results and instead to celebrate the players as people, rather than just as competitors.

We believe these screens helped elevate the viewing experience of the stream, the fun facts led to players (and spectators!) being excited to see what theirs were as they arrived on stream, and overall created an exciting community tradition. On top of just being exciting for the community, it provided the commentators something to discuss between matches and has just overall been highly received by the community.

Gorilla Achievements/Transitions

Upon inspiration of bowling alley transitions, we created 30 custom bowling-alley-style win screens (think what plays when someone gets a strike). Each of them is catered to a specific in-game action. In addition to transitions upon a game being won, we also have small pop-ups for "Gorilla Achievements," which we use when a player does a specific impressive action in game. There are about 15 unique Gorilla Achievements.

As you can see, most of the achievements and transitions are jovial in nature, which adds a fun spirit to streams. It can even make people bust out laughing when they see the transitions in person! Gorilla achievements are an in progress feature which we will add more to as time continues.

Our future plans are to add more Gorilla Achievements as well as custom win-screens for individual players who are tournament regulars.

Gorilla Replays

A final element we wanted for our stream was the capability to showcase replays from recently played sets. This is a common feature across many large tournament streams. After we installed the popular plugin used to implement this, we tested and found it to be unstable on our machine. After investigating, we concluded that the problem was the result of the plugin storing replays in RAM. This led to OBS crashing whenever our stream machine ran out of RAM.

As we are a small team with a low budget, we were unable to simply use a stronger computer. Instead, we decided to write our own OBS Replay Script that works by saving clips to storage and stitching them together based on hotkey presses. This enabled us to easily build organized compilations of a player's kills throughout a set and display them within our stream.

On top of that, we were able to configure our replay compilation builder to take each replay saved and build a 'tournament compilation' file. This could then be used throughout the stream for scenes where we can display tournament highlights, either as background b-roll, or to be a featured portion of a be right back scene.

This enables us to automatically decorate our stream with highlights from the current event!

Reception

Now, given all that we put into developing the stream, we need to discuss how well the stream has accomplished its goals. As stated near the beginning of this report, the objective behind the stream is to boost the scene's growth, while encouraging the players in the scene to have a healthy relationship with the game.

Twitch Metrics

One method we can use is to observe the growth in the UTKesport's stream data. As all of our streams have been hosted using the UTKesports' Twitch account, which has traditionally been the account used for streaming UTK tournaments. While this account has existed for many years, it has never seen much use or growth. And the local Smash streams in the area were primarily used as a method for documenting gameplay so that players might look back at it to review their gameplay and search for ways they can improve their gameplay.

However, since The Gorilla has begun streaming, we have found success not just in viewership numbers, but in the emergence of new revenue streams for the UTKesports club.

As the graph presents, since the gorilla has begun streaming, we have seen growth that peaked at VOLAN25. For the exact numbers, we saw the stream revenue increase from $2.81 at VOLAN24 to $28 at VOLAN25. That is a 896% revenue increase. And aside from just a sharp increase in revenue, we can also point to the stream gaining a significant increase in viewers after the exposure and aftermath of VOLAN25

For the month of April 2025, we have seen 642 unique viewers who have visited our stream, and continuing into the month of May, we saw 423 unique viewers who continued to watch the stream. This indicates that with the exposure flashpoint that Volan25 provided us, we were able to convert a significant percentage of the viewers who tuned in for the regional stream into regular viewers who watch even our smaller local streams.

The Tennessee Gorilla Production team views these numbers as a massive indicator of our stream's success. We took a production typically used purely for documentation, and turned it into a source of great entertainment, and even created a new revenue stream for the UTKesports club.

Scene Growth

Aside from just growing the stream itself, it was also the hope of the Tennessee Gorilla that by upping the production value and providing a window into what the UTK tournament experience was like, we could bolster numbers and reverse the observed decline in attendance numbers our scene had begun to see in 2024.

The bar graph above represents the attendee count for each UTK tournament that happened during the Fall and Spring Semesters. The different forms of tournaments are colored differently. To observe overarching trends in the data, we have plotted a moving average of the data with a period of 4, selected because it provided a view of what the current trend was without over-smoothing or being too reactionary for outliers. Volan 2025 was excluded from the data set used for calculating the trend line since that tournament shouldn't be used for measuring Knoxville attendance trends, as the event is meant for players from a variety of cities.

Looking at the graph pre-2025, there is an observable decline in attendance capstoned by the final monthly of the year, having only 9 attendees. While the end of the semester hinted at this attendance picking back up, it was hard to not write off this uptick as simply the result of that tournament being the final fall tournament.

However, through 2025, we see that the trend continues, and yes, it does drop off after the first weekly. But the overarching average shows a slow trend of growth that peaks at around 20 attendees before VOLAN. It is expected that after the biggest tournament of the region, we would see a slight decrease in attendance, as VOLAN is typically seen as the climax of the season. However, despite this initial drop off, we quickly pick back up and see our numbers returning into the twenties for our final two events.

Overall, these results are modest, while the trend of declining entrants has been reversed, and we have found a steady attendance trend in the 20s, we would still like to see if we can push the scene's growth further. And on top of that, it is difficult for us to attribute this trend solely to The Tennessee Gorilla. Sam, the head Knoxville tournament organizer, has also been working effortlessly alongside us to promote events and even negotiated with the esports club to lower the venue fee to $1 an entrant.

However, not to diminish our efforts, the numbers do show that the fruits of all efforts involved have led to a positive outcome. And, while we may have found limited success in growing the scene beyond ~20 participants a tournament, we have found that the stream's success is not anchored to attendance count.

Overlaying the number of unique viewers over tournament entries, we can see that our streams have constantly drawn a larger audience to these events than we would have otherwise. And regardless of the trends in attendance, we have found that the stream continues to grow. This indicates that even if this is the best numbers our tournaments see, our stream still has plenty of room to grow. And we are sure that as the stream grows, that growth will slowly be reflected back within the scene itself.

A Post VOLAN Gorilla

Given all we've accomplished so far, it would be easy to sit back and let the slow growth we've found propel us forward. But The Tennessee Gorilla doesn't stop innovating. We'd be too bored otherwise. With all that we have planned, we're gearing up for a very exciting fall season, with plenty of planned improvements to our viewing experience, and even more enrichment in order to increase the scope of the events we cover.

Gorilla Gimms

Already, we have begun the rollout of plenty of new features to the stream. Recently, we have had a focus on increasing the 'interactivity' of our stream. Giving our viewers methods of interacting with our stream significantly increases the potential for entertainment value and makes the scene feel much more like a community effort.

Our recent attempts at doing this has involved the usage of Twitch's Channel Points feature, which we dub Gorilla Gimms. These are points viewers earn for watching the stream, and we have provided our viewers with multiple ways our viewers can use their Gorilla Gimms in order to shape the stream to their liking. For example, viewers can spend their Gimms in order to request a specific match be hosted on stream, or if they are interested in the players involved within a match, they may use their Gimms to request we put the winner of the match on the mic.

On top of just providing ways players can spend their Gimms to shape the stream, we have also created a method by which the players can wager their points on the outcome of a match. By using Twitch's prediction feature, we build a script that automatically posts a Twitch Prediction of the two current players, that lets our viewers put their Gimms where their mouth is. And since this feature's release, we have seena  significant uptick in viewer engagement.

While a scene pointing out something viewers might already find in the chat might seem redundant, we have found by including this scene it both reminds our viewers to take advantage of the feature, and also provides an avenue by which players in the venue can scan the qr code in order to make wagers despite being in the venue. This has provided a whole new vector by which our scene interacts with the stream.

Aside from just presenting the odds on the 'gambling' scene, we also include them throughout the rest of the stream.

For example, within the main games scoreboard, we represent the current betting odds of the current match with a bar beneath the players' names. If player 1 has more Gimms behind them, the bar will update to represent this. So, in the screenshot above, the player EdSheeranGamingWii has slightly more players betting on their win than The Gorilla Inviter. This lets players watch how the odds change as a set goes on, and can provide an incentive for viewers to put more on their favorites in order to influence the bar.

As a whole, we believe that Gorilla Gimms provide a substantial way for viewers to interact with the stream, and is crucial to our growth. Aside from just the current factors listed here, we have a whole host of ideas for improving and adding to the current usage of Gorilla Gimms.

The Arcadian PR Reveal

We produce three special tournaments: Volan, Smash Bash, and our yearly arcadians. An arcadian is a competition exclusively for unranked players across the state. This year’s arcadian featured players from Knoxville, Cookeville, and Chattanooga.

But we also produced something for our ranked players as well! The Tennessee Gorilla created a special video to announce our Spring Top 10 players. We played it to a stream of around 30 viewers right before the grand finals of the tournament. Our announcement started with a short and funny 4-minute video to build up hype.

After that, we put a commentator on the microphone to announce our community awards (Gorilla Awards) to celebrate players contributions outside of pure competitive success. This was followed by the top ten reveal. Our commentator highlighted each player’s achievements with brief descriptions of who they are and what they’ve done this season.

The Gorilla Invitational

Our biggest upcoming plan is The Gorilla Invitational!

This will be a Fall invitational tournament in the “summit” style where the tournament has 16 players who earn their spot into our day long tournament.

Summits typically have a diverse array of ways for players to get invited into the tournament. For ours, we are still working out the specifics, but we plan on integrating voting players into the tournament via Gorilla Gimms (stream channel points) or tournament attendance. By the end of a specified amount of time, players with the most votes will be invited into the tournament.

We also plan on reserving spots for out of region players so we can provide a friendly atmosphere across our state as well as introduce out of region players to our production. Players love to watch their friends compete on stream!

The Gorilla Invitational will go for a more home-y atmosphere than our regular tournaments. Speaking of “home-y,” we’re going to be hosting The Gorilla Invitational in an AirBNB. This serves doubly as a fresh atmosphere for our tournament where we can serve home cooked food throughout the day as well as a place for traveling players to sleep overnight if they need.

Conclusion