Daydream Atlanta: Running the show

I was the lead organizer for Daydream Atlanta, a free, teen-led two-day game jam at Georgia Tech and part of Hack Club’s worldwide Daydream weekend. Nearly 90 students came together to learn, build, and demo games they shipped to itch.io.

I enjoy creating video games and being part of creative technical communities. Daydream Atlanta was a chance to make that community tangible: a welcoming space for students—especially first-time game developers—to turn an idea into something playable and share it with other people.

Featured film — Daydream

At a glance

• Dates: Sept 27-28, 2025
• Venue: Georgia Tech Van Leer Building (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
• Format: In-person, teen-led, free (food, swag, prizes)
• Focus: Learn by building: lots of first-time game devs using Godot
• My role: Lead organizer

Partners & sponsors

We Create Tech, NSBE @ Georgia Tech, Women In Tech, Exploding Kittens, Jukebox, VMotiv8, and YRI Fellowship helped make the event possible.

The Weekend

The room stayed busy with teams learning Godot, working through bugs, and helping each other ship. At the end of the weekend, nearly 90 students had made and demoed games in exactly the kind of hands-on, creative problem-solving experience I wanted for the event.

What I wanted to make

Daydream is a worldwide, teen-run game jam built around workshops, hacking, and demos. My goal was to give Atlanta students a low-pressure way into game development: learn by building, find collaborators, and leave with something real they could play and share.

We prioritized Godot because it was accessible for beginners, but teams were free to use the engines and tools that fit their games. Every project needed to be playable on itch.io so it could be shared and judged easily.

I joined in, too

While preparing for Daydream, I built and released Yeastbound: Rise of the Dough so I could learn Godot by making a game myself. It placed 15th overall out of roughly 190 Daydream Global entries, and Hack Club highlighted it as #2 in Audio.

• Play it on itch: https://sharkingstudios.itch.io/yeastbound-rise-of-the-dough
• Source code on GitHub: https://github.com/SharKingStudios/Yeast-Collection-Game
• Read the full write-up here.

Thanks

Thank you to the volunteers, mentors, partners, and first-time jammers who made room for new developers to learn by shipping. Watching people push through scope, bugs, and export issues to share something playable was the best part of organizing the event.

Resources

• Daydream Atlanta info page (archival): https://daydream.hackclub.com/atlanta
• Daydream global overview: https://daydream.hackclub.com/
• Daydream Global jam page (dates, results): https://itch.io/jam/daydream-global