Daydreamer.ai

Inspiration

Inspiration “Play with ideas. Build what excites you.” That was the heart of DubHacks 2025, and it became the heartbeat of Daydreamer.ai

As kids, a blank sheet of paper could become a universe. Now, we coded that same creative magic into our screens. Daydreamer is a web-based AI storytelling studio where anyone, especially young thinkers, can co‑create stories with an empathetic AI companion. It’s built to spark imagination, nurture creative confidence, and celebrate curiosity through writing streaks, achievements, and daily check‑ins.

What it does

Users begin with a single idea, what we call a story seed. Then, they chat with an AI co‑writer powered by Gemini, building scenes, characters, and worlds, one message at a time.

Each story grows inside the Story Studio, complete with colorful animations, confetti celebrations for achievements, and playful design choices that make writing feel like play.

Users are also able to iterate on multiple stories at once!

Daydreamer tracks streaks, suggests daily writing moods, and encourages creative momentum, turning everyday imagination into lasting creativity.

How we built it

We used Javascript, HTML, & CSS for the frontend. We connected it to a Node.js backend using Express, with a Gemini API integration for generative storytelling. LocalStorage handles all user data.

The features include:

Real time AI Story collaboration
Interactive achievements with confetti animations
Mood check‑in modal to promote daily reflection
Light/dark/dream themes (Sunrise, Twilight, Midnight)

Challenges we ran into

A lot of us were relatively new to the tools we tried to use, so there was a lot of troubleshooting involved in the implementation of our system.
Using the Gemini API and getting it to parse our output was a significant challenge. The team member that handled it mentioned that he had to do a lot of troubleshooting to get it to work.
Prompt engineering formed a portion of our work as we used Gemini in our backend. Learning to structure our prompts to the backend was something we had to learn.
Deploying the website was hard for us to do, the team eventually ended up deciding to not spend too much time on deployment and rather pivoted to working on improving our features instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first hackathon for most of us. We're mostly freshmen and all of us are still relatively new to this sort of rapid software development. The fact that we got a working product feels like a big achievement in itself!
We were able to integrate the Google Gemini API!
We were able to solve most issues rapidly, usually within 30 minutes and no longer than an hour. Efficiency!
We love that our main storytelling feature works well!

What we learned

How to work with APIs, generating and making API keys.
Gained a better understanding of languages often used in web app development.
Gained a better understanding of the things that go into the construction of a web app.
Teamwork, we each had different limitations, and we worked together to try and overcome them.
We gain more experience in working collaboratively on GitHub with a larger team of contributors.

What's next for Daydreamer

After the hackathon, we would really like to continue our project and be able to deploy it (beyond Vercel)!
Aesthetics. It can definitely be way more interactive and returns more positive feedback for the user!
Logins, signups. For the sake of working on features we thought that were more interesting, we chose not to do signups or logins.