Australian indie developer House disclosed that large language models were used sparingly during the final stretch of development on its cooperative game Big Walk to help resolve difficult technical challenges and bugs.
The revelation emerged after a group of jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival stated they would decline to vote for any game developed with generative AI in any capacity. Big Walk was among the titles submitted for the festival before submissions closed on September 13, ahead of finalists being announced in January 2027.
House Addresses Unity Rendering Issues and AI Usage
House estimates that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code involved AI usage, emphasizing that generative AI was not employed in any other context during production. The studio detailed a specific performance hurdle involving Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline, where shadow casters behind the player were rendered at an infinite distance because the pipeline only allowed culling by distance in camera forwards.
The rendering issue caused the game to run 50% slower for roughly 20 seconds during sunrise and sunset. After researching the problem extensively, reading the render pipeline code, and consulting a Unity engineer who concluded the fix was not possible, the developers posed the question to an LLM chatbot.
Occasionally, text fragments generated by LLMs served as a baseline that developers subsequently adapted into actual game programming. The primary use case for House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues encountered with third-party code.
After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked. This fix represented about 10 lines of code inside URP.
House, Developer
Jurors Decline to Vote for Games Using Generative AI
The Independent Games Festival jurors noted a significant increase in submitted games utilizing generative AI tools. In a public social media post, the jurors stated that this year they are declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity.
The announcement asserted that AI-developed code shares in these negative impacts, and called upon the festival to institute a stringent anti-AI rule for subsequent years that bans any entries containing AI-generated content.
Fellow juror Liz Ryerson confirmed that Big Walk was being considered by the Independent Games Festival, and was a matter of discussion in judging as to whether its use of generative AI would be acceptable.
Reports circulated online indicating that the inclusion of AI in Big Walk fueled substantial debate and disagreement among both the judges and the broader jury selection. Given the title’s progressive positions in other areas, this revelation came as a bitter disappointment to several members of the jury and outside observers.
While the festival jurors did not name specific games in their initial opposition, social media discussions quickly tied the controversy to Big Walk. House stated that it originally wrote a version of its disclosure because it was a suggested part of the festival’s submission process.
We have not made any disclosure on Steam as the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. We are posting this disclosure as it has become a matter of public interest.
House, Developer
House Plans New AI Usage Policy After Big Walk
House acknowledged that Big Walk was developed without an internal AI usage policy in place, describing that omission as a failure. The studio stated it would work toward a more comprehensive policy moving forward while expressing concern that voluntary disclosures might contribute to the normalization or inevitability of the technology.
We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.
House, Developer
Prior to this disclosure, the game drew attention for omitting an Xbox release due to the developers’ support for the Palestinian-led BDS movement, which targets Microsoft as a priority boycott target.
