The game draws inspiration from a few disparate sources
Yes, I realize there is inherent tension between some of these sources- my hope is that the tension is productive in creating unique gameplay loops and forcing interesting design decisions. Each of those potentially interesting design decisions also represents fresh opportunities to shoot myself in the foot here, so I’m not quitting my day job.
The single best resource on hexagons and hexagonal grids is the blog from Red Blob Games, aka The Hexagon Bible
Since the underlying formulas for working with hexagonal grids are consistent and solved (see above) there isn’t a lot of room for creativity or problem solving here, so I went with a pre-built asset to give me something to work with. After testing out two assets, I went with the Hex Grid Toolkit, which is a fairly un-opinionated library of hex-related functions.
This made it easier to jump into learning the Unreal Engine environment by having something with which to play around.
Reasons for using Unreal