Key facts
- House House said LLMs were used sparingly near the end of Big Walk's development to work through technical challenges and bugs.
- House House said the AI-assisted code represents well under 0.1% of Big Walk's code.
- House House said it modified an LLM-suggested fix extensively into ten lines of code that ended up in the final game.
- Nineteen IGF jurors signed a statement declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity.
- House House said Valve does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage for Steam releases.
- IGF jurist Austin Walker called Big Walk an achievement while saying even minimal AI use overrode that respect for awards consideration.
House House, the developer of the co-operative puzzle exploration game Big Walk, said on November 11, 2026 that large language models were used sparingly near the end of development to help work through technical challenges and bugs. The studio said the AI-assisted code represents well under 0.1% of Big Walk's code.
The disclosure followed a signed statement by 19 members of the 50-plus-member Independent Games Festival jury, released on Monday, declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. The jurors cited ecological, economic, psychological and labor harms and urged the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years.
House House said the AI use stemmed in part from a Unity engine bug that slowed the game with infinite-length shadows. After a Unity engineer determined a fix was not possible, the studio said it consulted an LLM chatbot, which suggested a possible fix that the developers had to modify extensively into the ten lines of code that ended up in the final game. At least one social media user said the bug was fixable with significant human effort, according to the report.
House House said it did not disclose the LLM usage for Big Walk's Steam release earlier in 2026 because Valve does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. Valve's AI disclosure form concerns AI-generated content, not efficiency gains from AI-powered tools built into development environments, the report said. The IGF Awards make no such distinction, which led House House to mention the AI-assisted bug fix in its awards submission.
In its statement, House House said: "This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal." The studio said it was concerned that voluntary disclosures might contribute to the normalization of the technology and apologized that Big Walk's LLM usage may not meet some standards.
IGF jurist Austin Walker called Big Walk an achievement and remarkable and beautiful in a blog post, but said even minimal AI use overrode that respect for awards consideration. Fellow jurist Damon Reece wrote that the game was seriously special to him but that pain had to happen to steer culture away from AI use. IGF judge Liz Ryerson wrote on social media that she did not find House House's AI use personally disqualifying.
Big Walk's Steam page received over 400 negative reviews in the days after the disclosure, though Steam's anti-review-bomb tools appeared to limit the impact on its Very Positive reception, according to the report. The report also noted that the separate Indie Game Awards rescinded awards for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last year after developers admitted some in-game textures were made using AI tools.