Bring Your Own Story: Generating Interactive Visual Novels with AI

This paper presents an automated visual novel (VN) generation system that transforms plain text stories into interactive, branching narrative experiences using the Unity game engine. Unlike prior methods that rely on pre-authored decision points, our system dynamically parses a given story file, segments the narrative into scenes, and injects context-sensitive player choices at runtime. These choices trigger novel story continuations generated by GPT-4o, enabling emergent multi-path storytelling. This end-to-end pipeline, from raw text to full VN rendering, offers a lightweight and scalable tool for interactive narrative prototyping, particularly useful for authors and indie developers. Our contributions include a story segmentation and option generation mechanism, real-time LLM integration, and a Unity-based rendering framework. We conclude by discussing use cases, limitations, and opportunities for future research in generative storytelling and game design.