How to use React Native and Skia to build mobile games

“React Native can’t do games.” We’ve heard it hundreds of times. And it makes sense if you’re thinking about 3D AAA games. But for 2D games — tycoon, puzzle, idle, arcade — React Native with Skia is a surprisingly powerful option.

Why Skia

@shopify/react-native-skia brings the Skia rendering engine (the same one used by Chrome and Flutter) to React Native. This means:

• Native canvas rendering at 60fps
• Procedural drawing — rectangles, circles, gradients, paths
• No bridge — direct rendering on the native UI thread
• Cross-platform — same code on iOS and Android

Our case: Build Your Empire

In our business simulation game, the entire visual scene is drawn with Skia:

// Each building is a series of 8x8 rectangles
const drawBuilding = (canvas, x, y, floors, color) => {
  for (let f = 0; f < floors; f++) {
    canvas.drawRect(
      { x, y: y - f * 8, width: 16, height: 8 },
      { color }
    );
  }
};

Advantages of this approach:

1. Zero assets — no sprite sheets or texture atlases needed
2. Dynamic — the player’s tower grows in real time based on employees
3. Lightweight — the bundle weighs less without image assets
4. Customizable — changing colors or sizes means changing a number

Real limitations

Not everything is perfect:

• Not suitable for games with complex animations — no native particle system
• No physics — you’d need to integrate a separate library
• Visual debugging — no inspector like in Unity
• Small community — fewer resources and tutorials than Unity/Godot

When to use React Native + Skia for games

Conclusion

If you already know React Native and want to create a 2D game without learning a new engine, Skia is your best bet. It doesn’t replace Unity or Godot, but for certain genres it’s more than enough — and it lets you reuse all your React, TypeScript and npm ecosystem knowledge.

See Build Your Empire in action →