Thanks again for sharing your thoughts everyone.

I'm going with a roll-my-own solution for now I think. I'm building it out in AS3, as I want to be able to work quickly, but I think I will be porting it to HAXE once I'm feature complete.

While GPU solutions work well on tablet, Texture Atlases are far from ideal for our purposes. I have found working with very low-rez assets to be difficult to work with in 3D in the past. I can port the game to use a 3D renderer later if the game finds some success.

I have to say, your early concept art looks amazing

...so much so that I'm disappointed that the visuals you're using aren't in that style. The pre-rendered-3D is no where near as charming.

Looks like you're making great progress.

Sounds like the right call, given where you are.

It's definitely a balance.

I like writing tools, but I also need to earn a living making games. At the end of the day, things have to get done. If I were doing 3D, I'd be using Unity. No question.

I'm kinda dumbfounded that there isn't an amazing tile-based rendering solution out there. I realize there's no demand at AAA level, but it seems like for an indie priced license there would be a pretty large demand.

You have tools like RPG Maker that do way too much for you, GameMaker which has some pretty severe limits at a production level in how it attempts to be flexible, or roll your own almost entirely from scratch. There don't seem to be any proper engines to build on. 

Thanks for all the opinions so far. More are welcome!

The last time I wrote a 2D engine from scratch was 5? years ago. It's been a while, and I'm a much better programmer now.

We're debating doing a new 2D game, and to do what we're considering I presume I need to build from my own foundation. However there's a lot more options out there at this point. From frameworks to full-blown engine solutions.

Cross platform support is a must at this point. Traditionally, I'm an AS3 developer. I've been working with AIR for quite a while, but I've been considering rolling over to HAXE and OpenFL given the cross platform benefits. That said I could go another route as well... now that Unity has real 2D support, that's an option too! There are more choices as well, but I'm curious about other people's experiences.

If you were starting a large 2D tile-based game project today, what would you do?

Do it up.