im trying to make it so that if you press A on the 3ds, a sprite suddenly appears and plays a sound like a jumpscare.

You forgot to put it in a loop. Also, you don't need to make multiple separate IF statements and you don't have to run SPSHOW, that's only for if you hide it first. ACLS WHILE 1 IF BUTTON(2) THEN SPSET 0,1024 SPSCALE 0,20,20 BEEP 14 ENDIF VSYNC 'Make sure this runs once per frame WEND

thanks, im new to programming so this helped alot.

Just make sure you use loops whenever (and wherever) you can!