POSB wanted financial literacy to feel approachable for children, not like another lesson. Smiley Town turns money skills into an open-ended digital adventure: players move through a colourful world, meet characters, discover learning activities, and build good habits through play, stories, quizzes, and everyday examples.
I helped build the player experience as an explorable Phaser world with animated characters, interactive locations, guided onboarding, layered environments, and avatar movement. Vue and Quasar handled the surrounding application flows, while PixiJS, GSAP, and Howler brought character previews, reward moments, transitions, and sound to life across mobile devices.
The learning journey brought four POSB experiences into one progression system: Smiley World of Smarts offered puzzle islands, POSB Pocket Stories taught money management through familiar fairytales, EYEYAH! delivered nine quizzes on passwords, digital banking, and spending, and Smart Buddy Time connected those lessons to tracking real-world spending habits.
Completing activities advanced milestones and awarded Smiley Acorns. Players could claim rewards, spend the in-game currency on cosmetic collectibles, preview outfits, and equip purchases to personalise Smiley. Guest play, account registration, saved progress, announcements, onboarding states, and UX tracking made the experience work as a long-running platform rather than a one-off game.
Smiley Town unified several financial education formats inside one child-friendly world and gave each activity a shared reason to continue: learn, progress, earn, and personalise. The result was an extensible platform POSB could keep active without a fixed end date, with new learning content feeding the same milestones and reward economy.