riven | Tiny Flow Based Framework | Application Framework library

You appear to be asking why code within an ActionListener is never called unless you turn on a Swing Timer.

The reason is, the Swing library is an event-driven GUI library, and this library has listener classes that when wired into your code properly, have call-back methods that are called in response to events that occur while the program is running, such as KeyListeners that are called only when a keypress occurs.

The same is true for ActionListeners. Their code is only called when the listener is attached to an event generator, and that generator generates an event. For an ActionListener the event generator may be a JButton (via addActionListener) and then the listener code is called when the JButton has been pressed, or it can be attached to a Swing Timer, and when the Timer is started this generates an event that repeats every timer-delay milliseconds until the timer stops.

Other issues with your code:

• Always call the super's paintComponent method within your override. Otherwise housekeeping painting, such as cleaning of dirty pixels, is not done
• Never delete a Graphics object given to you by the JVM, such as you are doing, since this breaks the painting chain. Only delete one that you yourself have created.
• Your paintComponent method does more than it should, as it calls the paintDBG(...) method which changes the state of JLabel's visibility. That state change should go in the timer's ActionListener and not in the painting method.

You used the wrong variable:

Kind of hacky solution but you can try something like this:

As described in the comments you need to define a single class that represents all of the Champions. In the example below I have simply renamed the Ziggs class in your question to Champion: