Indie Game Big Walk Sparks Debate After Disclosing Minimal AI Usage
Developer House House revealed that large language models were used to solve technical bugs during the final stage of development, triggering discussions among Independent Games Festival jurors.
Independent developer House House has sparked an intense awards debate after disclosing that its video game Big Walk utilized generative artificial intelligence during the final stretch of its production. The revelation emerged after a group of jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival took a public stance against voting for any submitted titles developed using generative AI in any capacity.
While the festival jurors did not initially name specific titles when outlining their opposition, discussions across social media quickly pointed to Big Walk as a central subject of the debate. House House subsequently addressed the public interest by confirming its use of large language models to tackle difficult technical challenges and bugs.
According to the Australian indie studio, LLMs were applied sparingly to research and troubleshoot issues involving third-party code. The developers estimated that well under 0.1 percent of the game's overall code involved this usage, emphasizing that generative AI was excluded from all other aspects of production.
House House detailed a specific technical hurdle involving the Unity Universal Render Pipeline, where shadow casters behind the player were rendering at an infinite distance and causing the game to run significantly slower at sunrise and sunset. After exhausting other options, including consulting directly with an engineer at Unity who concluded the fix was impossible, the studio turned to an LLM chatbot.
The chatbot ultimately suggested a modified fix that accounted for roughly 10 lines of code inside the pipeline. House House explained that it originally prepared a disclosure version for its Independent Games Festival submission because it was a suggested part of the process, though it had not shared the information on Steam since the platform does not request code or chatbot disclosures.
The developer expressed regret over the situation and acknowledged the concerns surrounding the technology. In their full statement, the studio stated that they support the work of individuals trying to limit the harm caused by generative AI and apologized that their LLM usage may not meet industry standards.
Furthermore, House House admitted that Big Walk was created without an internal policy governing AI usage, describing that absence as a failure. The studio confirmed plans to establish a more comprehensive policy for future projects, while reiterating that their disclosure was not intended to endorse or normalize the use of AI tools.