I am looking to make a simple full on 2D game and I am looking for an alternative to DarkGDK (Which I have some experience with).
The game I am hoping to create will be: - using only tiles and 2d images. - only online. (I have already built the basic server engine on python) - created using a good portion of programming (in C++, java, or python). I am hoping that I am wrong but I believe there isn't much emphasis on programming.
Please help me find out if unity is right for my project.
Yes, you can do that. You put images on quads and manipulate them like other 3D objects, except you ignore the third dimension. There's a great deal of emphasis on programming in Unity, if that's what you're asking.
2D games are certainly possible. The camera basically never rotates and it only will translate on two axes or "zoom" on the third axis. All of the action for you character will take place in only two axes. However, don't be fooled, your game will be using a 3D engine.
The really cool thing about making a 2D game in a 3D engine is that you can have foreground and background elements to use in the scene and even gameplay. In traditional 2D games that would have been done with parallaxing. Now you just have a third dimension to play with. Not bad!
Here's an example of a 2D game that I'm 99% sure was made using Unity. It utilizes the 3D engine to make 2D puzzles. Very, very cool.