I’m not trying to make battlefield 1, but just a top down shooter with sprites rather than realistic models. Problem is I’ve never made a game before. What should I do? I’m clueless, obviously, but I want to make something small but in a grand way (almost got that quote right).
Hi Juan, welcome!
I understand how you feel but fortunately we are in 2016 
You need to make a roadmap for your game and help yourself with the free templates/projects, (video)tutorial, this forum and UE4 Answerhub.
Salutations ,
First of all depending on how familiar you are with UE4 you may want to check out these free video tutorials that Epic has provided for us:
They cover a lot of topics and should get you familiar enough with the game to figure out most things that they don’t cover.
Once you get past those and are ready to start on the game you have described here it may be worth it to check out this series as even though the perspective is different it’ll show you how to work with the 2D tools: