SENSE: a state-aware emotion navigation storytelling engine
The paper proposes SENSE, a state-aware framework for generating playable branching visual novels with multi-track affective navigation. The framework integrates a stateful narrative architecture called MIND, a structural analyzer and a path-aware context management module, and can generate multiple intersecting routes from a small number of high-level inputs while maintaining character consistency and narrative causality. Evaluations using LLM judges, affective metrics and visual evaluation show SENSE outperforms baselines in narrative diversity and asset integration robustness, and initial human playtests show a directional improvement in affective fidelity with comparable fun.