City builder game advice

Hello everyone,

I am currently researching technologies for a city builder game for web and mobile, e.g in React and React Native. The high level objective of the game is to allow players to build, manage and upgrade their own sports city, similar to something like Sports City Tycoon .

This game will actually be a companion game to our main product, a sports prediction game, that is built with React and without any 3D components. We have decided not to use something like Unity, because embedding Unity within React and React Native seems like a tall order and does not provide a seamless user experience, and more importantly we do not have any Unity developers in-house.

From a tech perspective, the solution must be able to seamlessly integrate with our existing technology which is Javascript/React/React Native frontend and Python based API backend. Switching between the sport prediction screens and this builder game should be seamless (for example we do not want to build and maintain 2 different mobile apps).

From a user experience perspective, the game might consist of these types of features:

  • The user can view the city from a birds eye view.
  • Zoom in/out, and rotate.
  • Click and interact with buildings ( e.g. to apply upgrades ).
  • See “upgraded” buildings render immediately.

I wanted to get some feedback from this community to see if PlayCanvas is the right option for us or if there are any recommendations out there for how to go about developing this companion game.

Thank you!