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

TL;DR

This paper introduces Forking Garden, a framework that uses narrative archetypes to guide the procedural generation of branching video game storylines and gameplay structures.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach for narrative arc-conditioned gameplay planning that explicitly incorporates archetypes into game generation.

Findings

Generated diverse branching game structures aligned with narrative arcs

Developed an end-to-end interactive system implementing the framework

Achieved multimodal alignment of gameplay elements with story nodes

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.