Melchior wrote:I don't want to appear needlessly negative, but you seem to have no idea about how to do what you intend to be doing. Anyway, since apparently you won't be coding or drawing anything, those who potentially will will have their personal preferences, I suppose.
Let the man dream, in any event.
The RPG is easily the simplest genre to program, so that's a good choice on your part to get started with. What you need to remember about programming is that the less complex the language, the less freedom you have to work with. RPG Maker and Scratch are very easy to work with, but hugely limited. C++ is colossally powerful, but gives you that "staring into the abyss" feeling the first time you open it.
I highly recommend, for an RPG, that you start off by creating your combat engine, since that's the meat and potatoes of the game anyway and requires the least graphical work. That can be done fairly easily in JAVA (for instance, BlueJ) or even more ideally, Processing. Once that's done, creating the overworld map and triggers is much easier, in terms of math and programming. Come to think of it, I
believe NetBattle was constructed using Visual Basic, and I did some very tentative work using that on a similar project. I'm sure there are tech demos for Processing on how to do isometric view, but I couldn't even begin to tell you where or how they work, so I don't know how compatible with your project.
Now, the Flash languages (AS2 and AS3) are very powerful, but they're very complicated to work with for first time users and need you to mortgage a firstborn. Processing's good to use here, but I should warn you that an entire development team at my school spent a semester working on a Processing RPG and only came out with a tech demo. I can't stress the importance of doing this stuff in text first enough: just getting Room() objects in BlueJ to cooperate took a couple of days for me, and that's without having to worry about what they looked like. Just getting the game to correctly scroll between rooms while using good programming habits is a complicated affair, and should be done first. I'd almost be inclined to say "Do the whole thing as a text-based in JAVA first so you can straighten out your inheritance tree," but that's your team's decision.
Best of luck to you and your group: as was mentioned above, this is a mammoth undertaking, and I hope you're all aware of that. That's not to discourage you at all, but please keep in mind that there are whole college courses dedicated to doing what you're trying to do. Like I said, I've seen game teams work from January to May and come out at the end with platform demos with gravity problems, limited Mode 7 demos, and RPG overworld demos, and these were considered rousing successes. It took me close to two weeks to make a single level of a skeleton text RPG.
If you want any help, I can try, but my experience is somewhat limited. Good luck, and have fun.