I was watching Studyy - one of my favorite Call of Duty players - run a community tournament on his Twitch stream. And somewhere between watching him alt-tab to update a Challonge bracket, then switch to his Google Form to check signups, then jump back to Discord to announce draft picks, then back to Challonge because he forgot to update something - a very specific thought crossed my mind:
I am a software developer. I could fix this. Why has no one fixed this?
The second question answered itself pretty quickly. The first one haunted me for the next few weeks.
Here's the thing - this wasn't starting from zero. I'd already helped build the system Studyy was using. Google Forms for signups. Challonge for the bracket. A workflow that worked, as long as "worked" meant one person manually copying data between two tabs like a very determined secretary.
Then the tournament evolved. Wheel spins. Degen format additions. Randomized chaos that the community loved and the admin pipeline absolutely did not. What had been a two-tab shuffle became a six-alarm coordination problem for a single person running it live on stream.
Challonge exists. Google Forms exists. Between them, you can run a tournament. What neither of them does is talk to each other, run a draft, spin a wheel, or remember that you already updated that bracket entry three minutes ago. The glue holding it together was a human being, and that human being was clearly suffering.
So I did what any reasonable developer does when they identify a solvable problem: I opened a new project folder, picked a tech stack, and dramatically underestimated how long this would take.
The requirements sounded simple in the way that all requirements sound simple before you build them. One dashboard. Signups flow in from Google Forms. Admin runs a draft - snake, random, or manual, depending on how chaotic the community is feeling. Finalized teams push to Challonge. Bracket fills itself. Nobody copies a player name by hand ever again. One button to start the tournament and trigger updates across every connected service.
Write it down like that and it looks like an afternoon project. Reader, it was not an afternoon project.
The first wall was Challonge. Their v1 API is versioned in a way that suggests it was designed by someone who had heard of REST but had strong opinions about it. Getting OAuth working meant building a local callback server, catching the token mid-redirect, encrypting it with Electron's safeStorage API, and storing it on disk in a way that Windows would protect with DPAPI. For a bracket app. For a CoD streamer. I was in it now.
Google was its own adventure. OAuth2 with a desktop app means no browser redirect to localhost that Google trusts by default, a service account you have to provision, and a Forms API that is powerful, documented, and somehow still confusing at 11pm. Both integrations eventually worked. Neither of them worked the first time, or the second time, or - honestly - the time after that.
Then the snake draft board populated for the first time. Twenty-four players. Teams assigned. Pick order locked. A timer ticking down in the corner. Admin can search players, drag picks, reset the timer, and when it's done - one push sends the whole thing to Challonge.
That was the moment. That was when it stopped being a project and started being a tool.
Here's what running a tournament with The Colosseum actually looks like:
Admin opens the app. Setup tab: tournament name, game, date, signup deadline, team size, draft style. Hit save - the Google Form updates automatically with those details. Link goes out to the community. Signups come in. Deadline hits.
Draft tab populates with every player who signed up. Pick your draft mode - snake if you want structure, random if the community is chaotic, manual if you want full control. Timer starts. Admin picks a player per team, round by round, with a reset button ready for when someone goes AFK mid-draft. Search bar filters the player list live so you're not squinting at 24 names trying to find the one you want.
Draft locked. One push. Challonge bracket fills with the team names, the date, the stream link. Brackets tab opens so the admin can update match results without leaving the app.
Start tournament. Done.
No alt-tabbing. No copy-paste. No midnight Discord pings asking why the bracket has the wrong team name.
The GitHub release went up. The installer built. The .exe works on Windows 10 and later. The app is called The Colosseum because it was called "Tourney App" for months and that name is soulless and gladiators do not compete in the Competition Venue.
The app works. Anyone can run a tournament without bouncing between four tabs. The community gets their degen wheel spins and their snake draft chaos and their bracket updating in real time. And I learned something that sounds obvious but apparently needed several iterations of OAuth headaches and late-night API docs to actually land:
When you see a problem you know how to solve, the only thing standing between you and solving it is deciding that you're going to actually solve it.
There's no reason not to do what you know you can do.
Be the change we wish to see, or something like that.
Link to the GitHub Release: GreenSide's Collosseum App
