The Garden of Forking Paths: Narrative Arc-Conditioned Gameplay Planning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01245v1
• Date: Sat, 02 May 2026 04:56:06 GMT
• Title: The Garden of Forking Paths: Narrative Arc-Conditioned Gameplay Planning
• Abstract summary: We propose a framework for narrative arc-conditioned gameplay planning that generates branching games from user-provided storylines.<n>Our approach first generates a diverse pool of independent nodes, then assembles them into a dungeon graph via arc-guided constraint algorithms.<n>We develop an end-to-end interactive system that instantiates the framework.
• Score: 6.552802750419537
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Narrative archetypes (e.g., Hero's Journey, Three-act structure) provide universal story structures that resonate across cultures and media and are important for video game storytelling, yet existing LLM-based methods lack explicit use of these archetypes in procedurally generated games. We propose Forking Garden, a framework for narrative arc-conditioned gameplay planning that generates branching games from user-provided storylines. Our approach first generates a diverse pool of independent nodes, then assembles them into a dungeon graph via arc-guided constraint algorithms, where each node achieves multimodal alignment of gameplay elements. We develop an end-to-end interactive system that instantiates the framework.

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