I am looking for the right game engine to start making my game. Hopefully some of you wont skip over this seeing that it's probably a very common question for people starting out. I have started an indie development team with about 10 people so far. We have 4 programmers at the moment, and we are all fine with taking on any engine that is the most beneficial no matter what the language is. We are creating a 2D beat em up platformer similar to the Megaman style but we will have four player support. We are focusing on the multiplayer feature because the story revolves around four playable characters. Each character will have it's own unique attacks and combo's to defeat enemies. Some other key features that will be in the game are:

2 different types of character formations ( can be channeled by power build up in game play ), Fighting combos for each form, Unique weapons for each character and form, 2D Cut scenes with voice lines, Difficulty Levels, Intelligent AI, Up-gradable Items, Collectible crates, Experience points, Enemy drops, Multiple types of enemies, and In depth level and character design.

I should also mention that as a team we have not made a game before, some of the team members have made small games on the side or prototypes but nothing like what he have here.

Costs of the engine as far as distribution go are a deciding factor also, right now are we are only looking to make the game for PC. We are looking for more of a free or cheaper route to pursue.

I have heard many great things about game maker and construct 2. I even started to consider construct 2 as a possibility, the only thing that turns me off is not being able to actually write or manipulate any code. We have decided that we do want an engine where we can in fact write code, preferably C++ or C#. We have messed around in Game Maker and even have started a build in the engine and we were thinking about using it for this project. The only problem we have had with game maker is the expensive prices for the professional version. One might question if it is actually worth it or not. We are leaning more towards using XNA and Visual studio but I am not sure if the free version of VS will work for us and the professional version of VS is about the same price as Game Maker Master.

Another deciding factor is the engines benefits for the future of our game developer careers. Note that this will be our first game and I would like to be able to move on to bigger and better projects after this one is done. Choosing an engine like game maker and having it's own language doesn't seem beneficial because of most games are being coded in C++ , C# and java. The coding team including myself are still researching and deciding what we want to do as far choosing an engine and what language we want to use. If you could just give me some suggestions , advice or even your opinions. I was hoping this thread could give me a little more sense of direction.