An old school RPG with a horror twist

Styx is a short game demo currently in development by Lammbers using Gamemaker. Planned to be in the style of an old-school RPG (like Mystery Dungeon) with a focus on turn-based combat like the fallout-vats system.

For this project I created a system in Game maker which plays an audio prompt based on when the game is drawing text. This was based on Peyton Burnham’s RPG YouTube tutorial series ((Branching Dialog System with Effects in GMS 2! (Part 1: Setup and Typing Effect), Viewed 28/8/25).

First, I store all the games potential dialogue in this script. This script can be pulled on at any time to show the dialogue needed for the scene and creates the case for each conversation. 

This is then fed into an identifier that can figure out which case refers to which character and display/plays the right assets (this is what determines their voice and their animated sprite). Once the characters voice has been defined, then if the game determines that a character is talking (text pause timer <= 0) it will start running the code to play the audio and animation. There is also an added feature that if there is a comma, space or exclamation mark then the audio with have a brief pause.