What is the best way to go about making a top side up tile and turn based rpg?
If you just want a game you should look into something like rpg maker or game maker, they're simple to use and much more biased in their design towards games of the type you're speaking of.
If you want to learn to code then it really depends on what language you want to learn..
Satharis hit the nail on the head. If you want to just make an RPG, get a copy of RPG Maker. I think Bundle Stars might be running a deal for it or you can hold out for the Steam Winter sale. It's such a specialized tool, that it will do all the heavy lifting for you (and most of the light work too). Along the way you will learn some coding basics as you need to script custom events and such. Tutorials are great for this.
If your goal is learning to code, put this RPG idea on hold because it's a much different journey. Learning how to program is a long and hard process. Consider the difficulty on par with learning a musical instrument or a new language. Head over to Khan Academy and work through the programming courses. Once you finish a lesson, be sure to mess around with the concept and see what else is possible. (Khan Academy teaches JavaScript)
https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming
Once you learn a bit of JavaScript, you can start messing around with a game engine like Unity. All the official tutorials are in C#. You can either start learning C# (your 2nd programming language is MUCH easier to learn than your first) Or follow along and do your steps in JavaScript.
Once you learn the basics of Unity, you can start making really simple games. You STILL need to keep the RPG idea on the back burner because you still don't know what you don't know. :) Take a look at this article and start making the games on the list. It tells you which games you should be making first and why.
If you go the "learning to code route" you'll be tempted to jump right into your RPG after you learn your first for-loop. DON'T. RPG's are extremely complex and one of the most content intensive genre's out there. Learning to code is a complex process, so don't make it more complicated with an extremely difficult game to make. You'll only get frustrated and wind up quitting.
- Eck
Both Java and Python will work. For Python there is pygame, a simple library for handling screen and IO, which you may like.
Ruby will no doubt also work, but no experience with it at all.
If you want to go browser-based, Javascript will be useful (but no idea otherwise, I have no experience in that area).
In general, there isn't a "best programming language" for making X. Aside from a few exceptions, and some obvious mismatches, pretty much any language will work.
They all provide bricks in various shapes and sizes to build a house in whatever form you like. The differences are in the size and expected purpose of the bricks.
Dedicated tools like RPG maker provide big and mostly pre-filled skeletons where you just fill in the holes, and big bricks that perfectly match up, leading to a sort of click'n build house. Engines like unreal and unity also provide skeletons, but with much more flexibility (no experience there, sorry).
The C language on the other end of the spectrum provides very small bricks, you have to do a lot of work, but it can provide magic results.
C++, Java, and Python are more like your average sized bricks, general purpose, but it works nicely for all normal houses.
As for starting, just start programming. Print a table of 14, write code, make a sprite move over the screen. Everybody finds out how it works in a different way, but all of those ways eventually give knowledge how to do things. On the other hand, the more you learn, the more clear it becomes there is loads more to learn :p
Have fun!
