House House has clarified it used AI tools “sparingly” during the “final stretch of development” on Big Walk to address “difficult technical challenges and bugs.”
The Australian indie studio released a statement to Aftermath after a group of jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival (IGF) said they would not vote for any game developed with generative AI.
Big Walk was one of the games submitted for the IGF. Submissions closed on September 13, with finalists to be announced in January 2027.
In a social media post, the IGF jurors said they had seen a “significant increase in the number of submitted games developed with generative AI tools.”
“This year we are declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. We urge the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.”
House House explained its use of AI tools, including the implementation of LLMs “to research, via chatbots, issues encountered with third-party code.”
“In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point to be modified into game code – we’d estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage, and generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.”
House House provided the following explanation, noting it wrote “a version of” this disclosure for the IGF, as it was a suggested part of Big Walk’s submission:
“We needed to cull shadow casters by distance from the camera, but Unity URP only allows culling shadow casters by distance in camera forwards, so shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at an infinite distance.
This made our game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We researched the problem extensively, and we looked at the URP code ourselves, but we couldn’t find a way. Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasn’t possible.
Finally, we posed the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked. This fix represented about 10 lines of code inside URP.”
House House stated it has not disclosed this information on Steam because “the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. We are posting this disclosure as it has become a matter of public interest.”
“This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal,” the developer said.
“We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of this technology, or its treatment as ‘inevitable’. We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to video games and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.”
“Big Walk was developed without an internal AI usage policy in place, and we consider that lack of policy a failure. We will work to have a more comprehensive policy going forward.”