I started with the production problem, not the cloud service: how can a team test timing, pacing, and implementation before the final voice recordings exist?
Why I made this
Written dialogue does not reveal how a scene behaves once every line has duration. Waiting for final actors can delay implementation and make pacing problems expensive to discover.
Generating placeholder audio one line at a time would replace one bottleneck with another. The useful workflow needed to take the structured script the team already had and produce a complete set of consistently named files.
What I did
I showed how to install the Node package, read the dialogue from a spreadsheet, loop through the rows, send each line to AWS Polly, and write the returned speech as MP3 files ready for the game project.
The scope stayed deliberately small. This was not a general introduction to AWS or speech synthesis; it was one repeatable solution to a game-production dependency, with the synthetic lines intended to be replaced later.
A note on the archive
AWS SDKs, Polly voices, authentication setup, pricing, and Node package conventions have changed since 2018. Use current AWS documentation and security practices before implementing a similar pipeline.
What still holds up is the basic move: I found a production bottleneck, used the structured dialogue we already had, and automated the boring part so the team could test the game sooner.