Colibri Dogfight Tournament in Review

Our VRChat Colibri Dogfight Tournament ended this past Saturday, we had around 60 pilots enroll to the event and three tournament winners which fought tooth and nail for the win. As we put this event behind us to focus on the future, we would like to have one last review of the event from the perspectives of everyone in Skyward that had a part in it from an organizational standpoint. Cubeboy's POV As the aircraft and world creator, this tournament was something special and terrifying at the same time. It had been more than a year since I had last made an event world like this for VRChat, so I had to readjust myself to the workflow and the way that this system works.

The match system that KitKat made a couple of years ago was never truly documented properly, which means that we rely on magical mystical knowledge from her and the other tournament world creators to set up the system properly. This means that I ran into a lot of issues that, in reality, had been nothing but an improper set-up of an object or a parameter. Tournament World Unity Project Screenshot Setting up a tournament world properly truly feels like discovering some ancient puzzle made by an advanced civilization, and solving it by throwing stones at it until it solves itself. Jokes aside, KitKat and VTail were extremely helpful and saved me several times. Sournetic was also very much an important part of the project, and helped me until the very last second and made sure that everything was running well. A moment I think was very much worth it, at least to me, was seeing people become as competitive as possible during the tournament. Everyone was not only trying their best, but making it a point to want to win no matter what. We had some absolutely insane matches that went on for maybe far too long, but they kept me at the edge of my seat the entire time.
We had a lot of technical difficulties, including VRChat's servers completely crashing and going offline the night we were supposed to have our finals, but with a quick reschedule and proper testing; we pulled it together, and we allowed our pilots to go ham. The tournament ended with a bang as our friend Sournetic made a very fancy animation to present the trophy to the tournament winner, who ended up being CriticalForce. The animation combined the design elements of the trophy with the classic animation style that Sour has had for the past couple of years
Personally, I quite liked the tournament. It was a fun event to run and make, and even more fun to watch. Stayed tuned for more tournaments and events in VRChat, this is just the first of many events we want to do as collaborations or as the sole developers and organizers! Hueman's POV One of the unique challenges of this tournament was the need to establish our own visual identity - while Skyward has taken part in many tournaments before, they had always been organized primarily by other groups. This was the first time we’d be the primary organizers of the event. This meant we had complete free rein over how the aircraft’s liveries looked. Well, almost complete - as a tournament livery, it had to be color-coded, so the crowd could distinguish between the contestants at a glance. It also had to reflect Skyward’s visual identity, and due to time constraints, preferably be simple and easy to implement in a 3D model. The livery ended up as a two-tone, Ferris-inspired paint scheme, with two highly contrasting shades of grey as the base - following the same design language of Skyward’s liveries for DCS aircraft, and with the added bonus of also being similar to the color palette used by Dogfight Central, our partners for this event. For the livery’s color trim - which identifies in which “side” the aircraft is on - I wanted to do something slightly different from the usual for VRC aviation tournaments. Instead of highly saturated, bright blue and red colors, I opted for more muted, desaturated tones instead, which we found better fit the livery base. For the finals, however, I wanted something special - something which told the finalists and the audience watching them that this was a completely different stage. And thus, the bright colors were back in - but not red and blue, no, that would have been far too pedestrian. Instead, I wanted a different set of opposing colors, one warm and one cold. Hi-vis orange was the substitute for red - a color with a long history of use in aircraft and which perfectly fit the livery. And as a substitute for blue, after trying out many cold colors, I found the one which best fit the livery was a slightly muted teal - in between blue and green. This unusual color turned out to be a fan favorite during the competition! Having settled on these colors, I wanted to integrate them into the trophy design somehow. After discussing some ideas with Benjamin_Yes, Dogfight Central’s artist who was going to model the trophy; and Reason2Die4, the Black Aces’ veteran trophy designer, a lightbulb eventually lit up in my brain and resulted in this very rough sketch: It combined elements from Skyward FM (the arrow logo), Dogfight Central (their challenge coin in the center), and the Colibri jet trainer itself, the star of the show - as well as the final’s livery colors. Benjamin set out to model it with his own twist in Blender, and the result is this gorgeous trophy - which, in keeping with VRC aviation tournament traditions, received its very own reveal animation by Sournetic, who contributed with his 3D animation and particle work skills. RibbonBlue's POV Colibri Tournament May-June 2025 was an important event for both Skyward Flight Media and VRC Dogfight Central (DFC), whom we recently partnered with. For all details on this tournament, see our blog post about it. Preparation for this event outside world creation and aircraft development also spurred on an effort to expand our own VRChat content on the website, standardize promotional imagery and all the usual tasks that come with hosting a tournament. This process was further streamlined with the use of the VRChat Flight Tournament & Airshow Checklist created by Stagnation of The Black Aces VRChat aviation community. It should be noted that this community provided 50.00 USD towards the combined 350.00 USD pool which competitors drew their cash prizes from. During the build up to the event it was great to see competitors fervently practice in the recently made Colibri Dogfight Center featuring the SW-210 Colibri in jungle and snow camouflage for both organizations. While that world was built, the flight values of the armed Colibri were refined by staff from Dogfight Central and Skyward Flight Media, making this our first collaborative effort even before the tournament began. DFC staff analyzed the aircraft in air combat, producing a Rate Graph competitors were given access to shortly before the prelims began on May 31st, 2025: SW-210 Colibri Rate Graph created by Dogfight Central. Now that the tournament is over, the Skyward x Dogfight Central Tournament World is now available for use. Tournament worlds like this are often not freely accessible, so it is great to see it become a resource for people interested in competing with their friends or for other organizations to host their own event. Media of the practice sessions circulated around the DFC Discord and X.com. Some competitors even posted videos of their matches throughout the tournament. For broadcasting and promotion, the DFC YouTube channel is hosting VODs of two of the preliminary blocks ( Block A , Block B ). The semi-finals and finals were hosted as a livestream, with the VOD available below:  DFC x SFM Colibri Tournament Finals While providing my own commentary with the basic fighter maneuver experts of Dogfight Central, I found myself genuinely enjoying the air battles that took place. Largely because of the flight characteristics of the weapon equipped version of the SW-210 Colibri, a majority of the battles were notably different from the type of air combat we normally expect between fourth generation fighters in these events. With the aircraft's engine able to be disabled by combat damage but with it possible to glide them back to the center stage runway for rearming, refuel and repair of the aircraft, all manner of exciting and unusual battles took place. It was hard to predict at times, which was very appreciated. While the unfortunate mass failure of the VRChat platform on June 7th, 2025 forced a one week-delay to the event, the tournament still concluded with few hang-ups. This event gave both parties more experience with preparing material for large-scale events and hosting future events together. Engine disabled SW-210 attempting to glide to safety. Picture by VTail64. Event Pictures Well known VRChat cameraman VTail64 took pictures during the prelims and finals of the tournament. Promotional media images used for social media and livestreaming by benjamin_yes have also been gathered. All pictures have been put into a Google Drive Folder : Event Winners First Place CriticalForce Second Place Savory Three Place fuwamon Event Credits Commentary benjamin_yes, CRDM and Jono from Dogfight Central. Cubeboy, Hueman, KOSMOS and Ribbon-Blue from Skyward Flight Media. Last but not least, Reason2Die4 from The Black Aces, and KitKat as a Special Guest Broadcasting, Promotional Material benjamin_yes, CDRM, Jono, RIbbon-Blue Event Photography VTail Colibri Aircraft Design Cubeboy and Hueman. Colibri 3D Modelling and Adaptation to VRChat Cubeboy Colibri Porting to SaccFlight Version 1.7 VTail Colibri Flight Model Refinement benjamin_yes, CDRM, Cubeboy, Hueman, Jono Match System
KitKat Tournament World, Match System Implementation Cubeboy Trophy Design Hueman and benjamin_yes Trophy 3D Modelling benjamin_yes Trophy Reveal Animation Sournetic Special Thanks The Black Aces for prize pool contribution. KitKat, Sournetic and VTail for assistance with various technical aspects making this tournament possible.