New to Unity, looking for some direction on making 2d tile based game

I am brand new to Unity and for my first actual game (I followed a tutorial for a simple pong game) I am wanting to make a 2d tile based game similar to zelda or pokemon. I have about a years worth of experience in java in which i made a very basic tile based game with collision, turn based fighting and whatnot. Now i am wanting to replicate/improve that game with unity! Only problem is that i have no idea on how i am going to do the simple stuff like reading a sprite sheet, cutting it up, making levels, enemies, fighting and so on.
If anyone could point we towards some good learning resources for those kind of things, that would be great! I would preferably want to use the new 2D features in 4.3 as they seem very useful, but any good tutorials for either would be fantastic!
thanks, Ryan

you could start here: Learn game development w/ Unity | Courses & tutorials in game design, VR, AR, & Real-time 3D | Unity Learn

If you’re brand new to Unity, just look at some good video tutorials, they don’t have to be 2D specific, just get yourself familiar with Unity in general first.

There’s a subforum specifically for teaching and learning: http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/23-Teaching you’ll find a whole bunch of online tutorials listed here. There’s also a whole bunch on YouTube, Udemy, Digital Tutors, etc

After you get much more familiar, you may want to invest into a 2D plugin for Unity. While Unity 4.3+ has some 2D features, there is no built-in tilemap support. I’d personally recommend 2D toolkit. Great feature set, amazing support, and has very good documentation and samples. http://www.unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/

Do you know of any other good, preferably cheaper or free alternatives to 2D toolkit? $60 is too much for something i’m just messing around with. I really like the tilemap editor that 2D toolkit has, so something with a similar feature would be great. Also, will it be hard to transition from java knowledge to either c# or javascript?

SpriteTile ($30) comes to mind for no apparent reason, just mentioning that randomly. :wink: If you know Java then C# is pretty similar.

–Eric