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

2026-05-02

AI Summary

Existing large language model–driven approaches to game generation often lack explicit modeling of classical narrative archetypes—such as the Hero’s Journey or the three-act structure—making it difficult to produce branching storylines that are both culturally resonant and structurally coherent. To address this limitation, this work proposes the Forking Garden framework, which explicitly integrates narrative arc structures into procedural game content generation for the first time. The system begins by generating diverse plot nodes from user input, then assembles them into a dungeon graph guided by narrative constraints, while simultaneously aligning gameplay elements across multiple modalities. This end-to-end pipeline enables the automatic creation of highly branching game narratives that are structurally sound, gameplay-rich, and grounded in established storytelling paradigms.

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.

Problem

• narrative archetypes
• procedural game generation
• gameplay planning
• story structure
• LLM-based methods

Innovation

• narrative arc-conditioned planning
• procedural game generation
• branching narrative
• multimodal alignment
• constraint-based assembly