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arXiv · 2605.01245

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

Yunge Wen·Chenliang Huang·Hangyu Zhou·Zhuo Zeng·Chun Ming Louis Po·Julian Togelius·Timothy Merino·Sam Earle
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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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Yunge Wen, Chenliang Huang, Hangyu Zhou, Zhuo Zeng, Chun Ming Louis Po, Julian Togelius, Timothy Merino, Sam Earle. 2026-05-02. The Garden of Forking Paths: Narrative Arc-Conditioned Gameplay Planning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01245

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