Forking Garden: LLM Framework for Narrative Arc-Conditioned Game Design

Researchers have unveiled Forking Garden, a novel framework designed for gameplay planning that is conditioned on narrative arcs, utilizing large language models to procedurally create branching video games based on user-generated storylines. Initially, the system produces a varied collection of independent nodes, which are then organized into a dungeon graph through arc-guided constraint algorithms, ensuring that each node aligns multimodally with gameplay elements. This method integrates narrative archetypes like the Hero's Journey and the Three-act structure, which resonate globally but have been largely overlooked in current LLM-based procedural generation techniques. An interactive system has been created to implement this framework, enabling users to input storylines and obtain branching game designs. This research was submitted to arXiv on May 5, 2025, in the Human-Computer Interaction category.