Under Pressure, Big Walk Developer House House Apologises for Using Generative AI "Sparingly" While Making Its Hit 2026 Game
House House said large language models helped debug code and accounted for well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code, after IGF jurors raised concerns.
- Australian developer House House updated its FAQ to confirm that Large Language Models were used "sparingly" during Big Walk's development to help resolve difficult technical challenges and bugs.
- The revelation follows a statement by 19 Independent Games Festival jurors who pledged to abstain from voting for any game using generative AI after observing "a significant increase" in such entries.
- House House estimated that well under 0.1% of Big Walk code involved LLMs, explaining they did not disclose this on Steam as the platform "does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage."
- Admitting Big Walk was developed without an internal AI policy—which it considers a "failure"—House House apologized and committed to developing a more comprehensive policy for future projects.
- Jurors decided to take a public stand after AI usage "set off some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools," reflecting broader concerns about normalizing generative tools.
25 Articles
25 Articles
The indie game community is in disarray over AI and Big Walk
Some Independent Games Festival (IGF) jurors published a statement yesterday saying they would not vote for games that use generative AI in "any capacity." Soon after, the developer of indie hit Big Walk has published a statement saying it "sparingly" used AI in the "final stretch" of the game's development to "help work through difficult […]
House House Confirms ‘Under 0.1 Percent Of Big Walk’s Code’ Was Written Using AI Following IGF Controversy
In a statement published on the game's FAQ, House House apologised to those 'trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing' after confirming their use of LLM tools
IGF jury puts out statement against voting for games that used genAI, ALLEGEDLY because of Big Walk using undisclosed Claude code. See Staff Post
As the year comes to a close, bunch of gaming awards shows are coming up, including Independent Games Festival. I wish I could just be posting this statement from the jury (not the final judges) because it's great, but it turns out, the news kinda sucks. Seems the whole discussion behind the scenes was about Big Walk, and specifically using Claude code, undisclosed...
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