Hi. It is nice to find someone who actually cares about quality here. My name is Art, I am a professional games developer.
Choose the framework and let's get started!
Option #1: Unreal Engine 4 - very powerfull, super fast prototyping, best performance, cross-platform, open source, 5% revenue goes to Epic Games
Option #2: Unity 5 - widely used for mobile games, fast prototyping, good performance, cross-platform, $1500 license
Option #3: Build custom C\C++ OpenGL ES2 engine just for this game. (Topic to be discussed separately)
For your game, I would recommend Unreal Engine 4. It is crazy fast to make a game in this tool (made a 2D mobile game in UE4 for one Italian company).
That is all, thanks for attention.
Hope to hear from you.
P.S. About my experience:
Used Unity C# API for about 5 years, built all kinds of 2D/3D game/editor scripts, wrote custom shaders, P/Invoked with native C/C++ libraries, integrated Facebook, Twitter, Ads, In-app purchases plugins/SDKs.
Also, worked for some software companies (incuding ones located in US) building tools, client-server applications, developing mobile games/apps in custom engines, Xamarin, C#+XNA framework, Unity and Unreal Engine.
Released a small game called Tiny Space [login to view URL]
Currently freelancing and spending my spare time working on this abstract racing game in Unity [login to view URL] (Early proto