DBS PayLah! set out to celebrate the people behind Singapore’s UNESCO-recognised hawker culture while giving the public an active role in the campaign. The experience moved from discovering and nominating hidden-gem stalls, through voting for finalists across five regions, into #UltimateHawker — an island-wide game that turned local food culture and real PayLah! usage into a connected digital adventure.
I helped build the awards journey across its nomination, transition, voting, and results phases. Participants searched for hawker centres, submitted favourite stalls by category, and returned to vote for shortlisted nominees across North, North-East, West, Central, and East. Configurable campaign dates, categories, announcements, returning-voter states, and live results allowed one application to carry the awards from public discovery through winner announcement.
The main game placed hawker stalls on a GPS-enabled Mapbox map across Singapore. Players travelled to virtual stalls, cooked and collected 30 local dishes across chopping, steaming, stir-frying, grilling, and boiling, then served timed monster orders for Coins. Dish rarity, freshness timers, stall cooldowns, special requests, limited-time missions, Golden stalls, and Hawker Rush events layered strategy and urgency over the location-based loop.
Real DBS PayLah! transactions rewarded power-ups that could extend dish freshness, increase the chance of a chosen cooking method, or instantly restock a stall. Daily and milestone missions, referrals, real-time Socket.IO events, and a multi-tier Tingkat reward system connected repeat play to S$85,000 worth of digital and physical prizes, with winner details and fulfilment handled inside the same experience.
UltimateHawker connected cultural discovery, community participation, location-based gameplay, and payments in one campaign journey. It gave hidden-gem hawkers visibility before the game began, then kept audiences engaged through a deep collection and reward economy where real-world movement and PayLah! activity directly shaped progress.