House House Reveals AI Used for Less Than 0.1% of Big Walk’s Code After IGF Voting Controversy

House House Says AI Assisted With Less Than 0.1% of Big Walk’s Code Amid IGF Debate

Big Walk developer House House has disclosed its use of generative AI during development after the game became part of a debate among Independent Games Festival jurors. A group of jurors says it will not vote for any game made with generative AI ahead of the festival on March 3, 2027.

The jurors’ statement did not name House House or Big Walk. However, people connected to the festival later identified the game as a major subject of discussion, and House House updated its FAQ to explain how it had used large language models, or LLMs, to help solve technical problems.

Jurors Call for a Ban on AI-Generated Work

Former games journalist and developer Austin Walker shared the jurors’ statement on Bluesky. It attributed this year’s difficult voting discussions to a “significant increase in the number of submitted games developed with generative AI tools.”

“This has set off some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools, and at this point there is no universal consensus on what (if anything) is to be done,” the statement reads. “The IGF has affirmed that we may cast our votes according to our own tastes and values. But we, as a contingent of IGF jurors, feel that this trend and the games embracing it deserve stronger pushback than a vote in silence.”

The signatories noted that not every juror supported the statement, while others might have concerns about signing it without professional repercussions. They said their aim was to show solidarity with people worried about the future of their art, craft and industry, including those who had tried AI tools but no longer believed their use was in the industry’s best interest.

The statement argues that generative AI can cause harm at any stage of game development and that “AI-generated code is not an exception to these harms.” The signatories called on the IGF to prohibit games containing AI-generated work in future years.

“For those reasons, this year we are declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity,” the statement says.

How Big Walk Entered the Discussion

Kyle LeClair, a four-time IGF judge and a juror for the upcoming festival, told Aftermath that debate over one game had become dominated by its use of AI. He praised the jurors’ stance, arguing that firm opposition was needed even though some people considered AI-assisted coding a gray area.

LeClair did not identify the game, but developer Bruno Diaz later said it was Big Walk. Diaz explained that House House had disclosed its LLM use as required by IGF rules. According to Diaz, the disclosure described several instances of use, mostly consultative rather than code generation or autonomous agents, making it inaccurate to characterize the use as limited to a single blocking bug.

Diaz said they did not consider that distinction meaningful, while adding that, to their knowledge, Big Walk was not in breach of Steam’s AI disclosure requirements. They also confirmed that the matter prompted extensive discussion in internal IGF forums, but declined to reveal further details or identify participants.

House House Explains Its AI Use

Following the discussion, House House updated its FAQ with a response to the question “Was AI used to make Big Walk?” The studio estimated that “well under 0.1%” of the game’s code had any connection to its LLM use and said generative AI was not used elsewhere in development. Its full statement reads:

“In the final stretch of Big Walk’s development, LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs. 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.

The primary use case for House House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code. If you’re technically-minded, and curious, here’s an example. 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.

We originally wrote a version of the above disclosure as it was a suggested part of our IGF submission. We have not made any disclosure on Steam as 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. 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 videogames 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 forwards.”

House House said it had not made a disclosure on Steam because the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot use. It added that the public interest surrounding the issue prompted the FAQ update.

The studio also recently made headlines for choosing not to release Big Walk on Xbox in accordance with the Palestinian-led BDS boycott against Microsoft Games. The game earned critical acclaim for its cooperative puzzles; read more in Game Informer’s review.

Big Walk Screenshots