House House clarifies the use of AI tools in the ‘final stage of development’ of Big Walk

House House said it used AI tools “sparingly” during the “final phase of development” of Big Walk to resolve “difficult technical challenges and bugs.”

The Australian indie studio released a statement to Aftermath after a group of jurors at the 2027 Independent Games Festival (IGF) said they would not vote for any games developed with generative AI.

Big Walk was one of the games submitted to the IGF. Applications closed on September 13 and finalists will 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 refuse to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. We urge the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for years to come, banning games containing AI-generated works.”

House House explained its use of AI tools, including implementing LLM “to find, via chatbots, issues encountered with third-party code.”

“In some cases, snippets of LLM responses were copied as a starting point for modification in the game’s code – we estimate that well less than 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this use, and generative AI was not used in any other context during the game’s creation.”

House House provided the following explanation, emphasizing that it had written “a version” of this disclosure for the IGF, as it was a suggested part of Big Walk’s submission:

“We needed to eliminate shadow casters based on camera distance, but Unity URP only allows shadow casters to be eliminated based on distance forward of the camera, so shadow casters behind the player were rendered at an infinite distance.

This made our game 50% slower for about 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We have investigated the issue thoroughly and looked at the URP code ourselves, but have not found a solution. Then we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked questions and ultimately concluded that what we wanted was not possible.

Finally, we asked the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, he suggested a possible solution, and although we had to modify the suggestion significantly, it worked. This fix was approximately 10 lines of code in URP.”

House House said it did not disclose this information to Steam because “the platform does not request disclosure of chatbot code or usage. We are releasing this disclosure because it has become a matter of public interest.”

“This is neither an endorsement nor an argument for the use of AI tools, no matter how minimal,” the developer said.

“We are concerned that voluntary disclosures like this could contribute to the normalization of this technology, or its treatment as ‘inevitable.’ We support the work of those trying to limit the harm generative AI causes to video games and our world, and we apologize that the use of Big Walk’s LLM does not meet their standards.”

“Big Walk was developed without an internal AI use policy, and we view this lack of policy as a failure. We will work to have a more comprehensive policy in the future.”