Behind the Scenes Page by Oscar Su

Project Snapshot

Manny Takes on Upper Management is a turn-based tactics RPG where capitalism starts in the crib. In a world ruled by baby executives, you play as Manny — a once-obedient baby who breaks the rules to rescue his best friend and challenge the corporate system by using teamwork and the power of friendship.

This is the first game I led from start to finish, guiding a team of student developers, artists, and composers across the full production process.

Meet Manny!

Guiding Questions

I began this project with two questions:

• Design Question: What new design opportunities (or limitations) emerge when using hexagon tiles instead of the traditional square tiles in tactics games?
• Leadership Question: How can I best lead a full development team, especially as someone with a background primarily in solo or programming-heavy roles?

Challenges and Solutions

Challenge 1: Navigating a Hexagonal Grid

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How do I build the core tactical movement in an engine that assumes square tiles?

Answer: Build and publish a navigation system myself!

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Since most grid-based games are built with square tiles, existing tools accommodate tiles of this shape. Even Godot’s built-in grid pathfinding system (AStarGrid2D) assumes square cells, and there were no off-the-shelf solutions for hexagon tiles.

All CellShape listed under AStarGrid2D are 4-sided…

Therefore, I wrote a custom library that has 18 functions from scratch in GDScript to handle:

• Coordinate systems
• Neighbor logic (finding neighbors of a cell that are within X steps)
• Pathfinding and range-finding