This week for our local Unity meetup group, I presented an intro to some of the new 2D Tools in Unity (There is an intro about more general Unity topics, so for the 2D stuff skip to 17 minutes in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xopzxmzFJUs

Here are the links to things I mentioned were outside of the scope of that talk but might be interesting to learn:

Sprite masks: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-SpriteMask.html

2D side scrolling brawler style camera (focus on 9-slicing sprites and new features for sorting): https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/2d-game-creation/introduction-and-goals

Platformer character controller: https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/2d-game-creation/intro-and-session-goals

https://github.com/MelvynMay/UnityPhysics2D - a lot of interesting scenes demoing 2D physics.

Pretty cool topdown game from Unity to show off tilemap and other 2d features (from a talk at Unite Austin, >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkaEh--qUAY>): https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/2d-gamedemo-robodash

2D Game Kit - This is a 2D Game that Unity built to show off 2D features, and what a complete project looks like including tools for designers so that they don’t need to dive into the code to create new puzzles, levels, etc. https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/02/13/introducing-2d-game-kit-learn-unity-with-drag-and-drop/, https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/s/2d-game-kit. Unity also recorded a live training for this recently that I’m assuming they will publish soon, but I can’t find a link to it yet.

Edit: Unity posted the live training for 2D Game Kit here: https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/projects/2d-game-kit/overview-and-goals?playlist=49633

What I covered in the video is using the new Tilemaps and associated features for designing levels in 2D. This was also covered by this Unity Learn tutorial: https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/2d-game-creation/intro-2d-world-building-w-tilemap, and this blog post: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/01/25/2d-tilemap-asset-workflow-from-image-to-level/. This are very thorough and a great reference for these features. I found that there were a couple of things I could talk about not covered in those videos, specifically how to create your own rule and random tiles, and how to create tiles and tilemaps from art that you generate or find yourself.

Finally, here is the collection of brushes and tiles that Unity has coded that cover a huge range of use cases: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/2d-extras

The ground sprites I used came from here: https://bitcan.itch.io/tileset-simples

And the flower sprites I used came from here: https://onimaru.itch.io/green-platform