# Story Designer: Towards a Mixed-Initiative Tool to Create Narrative Structures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.04909/) (2015)
- [Controllable Neural Story Plot Generation via Reward Shaping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10736/) (2018)
- [Story Realization: Expanding Plot Events into Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03480/) (2019)
- [Talakat: Bullet Hell Generation through Constrained Map-Elites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04718/) (2018)
- [Baba is Y'all: Collaborative Mixed-Initiative Level Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14294/) (2020)
- [Empowering Quality Diversity in Dungeon Design with Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05175/) (2019)
- [Mech-Elites: Illuminating the Mechanic Space of GVGAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04733/) (2020)
- [Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites: Analysis and Evaluation of the Expressiveness of the Feature Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03377/) (2020)
- [TropeTwist: Trope-based Narrative Structure Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09672/) (2022)
- [Let CONAN tell you a story: Procedural quest generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06217/) (2018)
- [DATA Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02251/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Beyond Prompts: Exploring the Design Space of Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07465/) (2023)
- [GENEVA: GENErating and Visualizing branching narratives using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09213/) (2023)
- [All Stories Are One Story: Emotional Arc Guided Procedural Game Level Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02132/) (2025)
- [Beyond Following: Mixing Active Initiative into Computational Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16291/) (2024)
- [The Garden of Forking Paths: Threading Narrative Archetype as a Semantic Signal Through Gameplay Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01245/) (2026)
- [Improving Collaborative Storytelling with a Multi-Agent Framework Based on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29625/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Narratives are a predominant part of games, and their design poses challenges when identifying, encoding, interpreting, evaluating, and generating them. One way to address this would be to approach narrative design in a more abstract layer, such as narrative structures. This paper presents Story Designer, a mixed-initiative co-creative narrative structure tool built on top of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) that uses tropes, narrative conventions found across many media types, to design these structures. Story Designer uses tropes as building blocks for narrative designers to compose complete narrative structures by interconnecting them in graph structures called narrative graphs. Our mixed-initiative approach lets designers manually create their narrative graphs and feeds an underlying evolutionary algorithm with those, creating quality-diverse suggestions using MAP-Elites. Suggestions are visually represented for designers to compare and evaluate and can then be incorporated into the design for further manual editions. At the same time, we use the levels designed within EDD as constraints for the narrative structure, intertwining both level design and narrative. We evaluate the impact of these constraints and the system's adaptability and expressiveness, resulting in a potential tool to create narrative structures combining level design aspects with narrative.