Big Walk Used AI in Final Stretch, Studio House House Confirms
House House, the studio behind Big Walk, confirmed it used AI chatbots late in development to fix technical problems. The studio says well under 0.1% of the game's code was involved. The disclosure has stirred debate among jurors at the IGF awards.
House House, the studio behind the video game Big Walk, has confirmed that Big Walk used AI chatbots in the final stretch of development, a disclosure that has split jurors at the IGF awards.
The studio says the use was small. It estimates that "well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage."
What House House says it did
According to the studio, large language models (LLMs), the technology behind chatbots, were "used sparingly" to "help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs." In some cases, snippets from chatbot responses were copied as a starting point and then modified into game code.
House House says generative AI "was not used in any other context when making the game." The main use was researching problems with third-party code.
The studio gave one example. It needed to cull shadow casters, objects that cast shadows, by distance from the camera. Unity's Universal Render Pipeline (URP) only allows that culling in front of the camera, so shadows behind the player were rendered at an infinite distance.
That made the game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. House House says it researched the problem and read the URP code itself. A Unity engineer it spoke to concluded the fix was not possible.
The studio then asked an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, the chatbot suggested a possible fix. House House says it had to modify the suggestion extensively, and the result amounted to about 10 lines of code inside URP.
Debate among IGF jurors
IGF jurors had earlier taken a hard stance against AI-developed games. They did not name any title. Within hours, news spread on social media that Big Walk's AI use was one of the biggest contributors to what the jurors described as "fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools."
For some in the jury pool and beyond, the news was a major disappointment, given the game's other progressive stances. Others see it as a sign of the times, or as distrust of the technology turning people against a game that had been on many GOTY shortlists.
Why disclose now
House House says it made no disclosure on Steam because "the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage." It says it is posting now because "it has become a matter of public interest."
The studio acknowledged critics' concerns. It worries that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to normalizing the technology or treating it as inevitable. It says it supports people trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to video games, and apologizes that Big Walk's LLM usage "may not meet their standards."
House House also admitted a process failure. "Big Walk was developed without an internal AI usage policy in place, and we consider that lack of policy a failure," the studio said, adding that it will work toward a more comprehensive policy for future games.
