Under pressure, Big Walk studio reveals it used generative AI “sparingly” while making its hit 2026 game
“It has become a matter of public interest.”
Australian developer House House has revealed it used generative AI “sparingly” to help make celebrated, indie, multiplayer puzzle game Big Walk.
In a statement sent to Aftermath – following a judging fallout related to the Independent Games Festival – House House revealed it had used large language models primarily to help debug the game’s code.
“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,” the developer said. “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 percent 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 added: “The primary use case for House House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code.”
The studio’s revelation comes after a sizeable number of IGF jurors – 19 of them – issued a statement saying they would not vote for any game that used generative AI during its development. This was done after seeing “a significant increase” in entry submissions involving generative AI use, which “set off some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools”. And rather than not vote for these in silence, a collection of jurors decided to take a public stand.
House House hadn’t disclosed Big Walk generative AI use anywhere before disclosing it for its IGF submission. “We have not made any disclosure on Steam as the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage,” the studio explained. “We are posting this disclosure as it has become a matter of public interest.”
House House added: “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 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 forwards.”
It’s a revelation that’s likely to leave a taint of some degree on one of this year’s brightest stars – a game Eurogamer awarded a full five stars to in its Big Walk review.
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