Openchamp Devlog 2

Openchamp Devlog 2

Date: 11/11/2025

Happy Tuesday! Needless to say, I've been a bit busy trying to conglomerate a plethora of systems, scripts, assets and text documents into a single, functional alpha test before this weekend. There's still a stupid amount of work to go though, so I won't be slowing down any time soon.

Announcements

Big shoutout to @Merchant for his contributions to the website and the Matchmaking Server! His peer reviews and pull requests have been immensely helpful, as I'm trying to focus on building out the game parts and not being as diligent as I should be on the other aspects of the project until the client is ready to use.

Also: Shoutout @GK for his devwork both in the past and present, and his perspective on existing systems has been extremly insightful and thought provoking when it comes to diversifying our game from the other MOBAs on market right now.

As well: I'm hoping I don't need to push back the Alpha test to next weekend, but I was unable to get as much as I'd like done this past weekend due to some personal responsibilities that had been neglected for a bit too long (sincerest apologies to my fiancee).

Website

I've updated everything on the site now, so it should be Mobile Responsive and work for open-champ.com

Development progress

I'm currently in the middle of updating the Abilities logic to work with an Entity Component System (ECS), which will allow us to develop abilities independent of champions and modify existing kits with a simple drag and drop, but here's some other highlights since my last post!

  • Began working on isolating systems and focusing on stability and signals instead of interconnecting everything to everything.
  • Finished the WebSocket Manager and Chat Client, which has been done for a while but now uses signal emitting for communication and is much more reliable, stable and bug-free!
  • Plugins! I LOVE PLUGINS! I'm going to be fairly strict on which plugins are allowed though, as to prevent the project from bloating into the abyss. We've added quite a few plugins though:
    • LOG: Enables Debug logging
    • Asset Placer: Addes an asset drawer for faster level design/editing. I tried a few alternatives, but I like this one best
    • CSG_Toolkit: Adds a lot of CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) features. Since I'm not comfortable with blender, this is a nice in-editor tool to help create/edit models. I know that this is not the optimal way to create models, but as of now, it works and it works well!
    • PathMesh3D: Adds some functionality to Godot Path3D nodes, which helps me create paths, roads, walls, and effects in-editor instead of in code.
    • Quill-IDE: Just makes the script editor in godot nicer to work with and look cleaner. This is very much non-required, but I like it so I'm keeping it.
  • Source Merge: I have been working on this game across my laptop, macbook, iPad (Xodot - check it out), and desktop depending on location, and while I've used a NAS to try to keep the source the same across platforms, many times the source code ends up desynced across devices because I'll start working on a system at home, leave for work, realize I didn't upload my changes to the NAS, start working on a new system on a new device, not finish it, you see where this is going...
  • Upgrade to 4.6d3: This is risky as this build of godot is a Development build, but in d2 they added a feature that completely changes remote debugging and would have saved an exuberent amount of time if I'd only had it when we started this project (ObjectDB).

TLDR: I've started the process of merging all my separate spaghetti coded instances into a singular source, which will be unprivated once the client is playable as a standalone.

Game Client / Server

Everything is broken right now due to my Manager update completely invalidating the NetworkManager global, and breaking it into a Websocket Manager, Chat Manager and GameServer Manager. Most of this is now done, but reimplementing the old systems is a fast way to destroy the work that has been done to make the game more managable as we continue to scale, so reimplementing Abilities, movement, minions, everything pretty much is required to continue adding new things. The good news: This new coding philosophy will prevent total refactors from ever happening again.

Closing Notes

  • Alpha Testing and OpenSourcing the client

The alpha test is going to start on November 15*. With this, a handful of individuals will be able to play a match from beginning to end and provide feedback on the existing systems and feel of the game. This feedback will then be processed, integrated and another round of testing will begin. When the game starts to feel more like a game and less like a prototype, I'll be hosting a 24/7 public server as the primary instance so anyone can play.

  • Videos

I'm thinking about recording some videos to accompany my devlogs with the hope that it will help build the community and bring in more interested folks. If that does end up happening, you'll see an update in the #Announcements channel in discord. If you're interested in helping with video editing, production or anything of that nature please reach out!

As always, please feel free to reach out if you'd like to help support the development of this project! There's lots of technical and non-technical roles that need to be filled, and I'm always looking for more help!

Have a great week everyone,

~ Cody

OpenChamp Lead Project Engineer