Submissions have closed for this year’s Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards, one of the biggest annual celebrations of independent game development. However, the event has already found itself at the centre of a heated debate surrounding the use of generative AI in the games industry.
A significant number of IGF judges and jurors have shared on social media the intense discussions they’ve had over the use of AI during game development. Following these conversations, a decision was made by some to abstain from voting for any game that had used generative AI in any capacity.
This has now put Big Walk, the critically acclaimed co-op title from developer House House, in a difficult position. Shortly after the controversy emerged, the studio published a statement confirming that Large Language Models (LLMs) were used during the game’s final stages of development to help resolve technical issues and bugs.
Big Walk Likely Out Of IGF Awards Following AI Disclosure
Following the recent discussion surrounding generative AI, fans noticed that House House had updated the FAQ section of Big Walk’s official website with a new question: “Was AI used to make Big Walk?”
The studio’s response confirmed that LLMs were used sparingly during the final stretch of development, primarily to help investigate difficult technical problems. In some instances, code snippets generated by AI were used as a starting point before being modified by the developers.
House House estimates that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code was connected to this usage, while generative AI was not used for any other aspect of the game’s development.
The studio also provided a detailed example of how the technology was used. A performance issue involving shadow rendering in Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP) was causing the game to run significantly slower during sunrise and sunset. After extensive research and consultation with a Unity engineer, the developers were told that their desired solution was not possible. An LLM chatbot eventually suggested a potential workaround, which House House then heavily modified and implemented.
The fix ultimately amounted to around 10 lines of code within URP.
House House’s Full Statement
You can read House House’s full statement below:
In the final stretch of Big Walk’s development, LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs. In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point to be modified into game code—we’d estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage, and generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.
The primary use case for House House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code. If you’re technically-minded, and curious, here’s an example. We needed to cull shadow casters by distance from the camera, but Unity URP only allows culling shadow casters by distance in camera forwards, so shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at an infinite distance. This made our game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We researched the problem extensively, and we looked at the URP code ourselves, but we couldn’t find a way. Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasn’t possible. Finally, we posed the question to an LLM chatbot. 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.
We originally wrote a version of the above disclosure as it was a suggested part of our IGF submission. 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.
This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal. We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of this technology, or its treatment as “inevitable”. 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.
Big Walk was developed without an internal AI usage policy in place, and we consider that lack of policy a failure. We will work to have a more comprehensive policy going forwards.
This isn’t the first controversy surrounding Big Walk, either. House House recently confirmed that the game would not be coming to Xbox platforms, citing the studio’s support for the BDS movement and its boycott of Microsoft.
Still, the whole saga prompts further debate about the place of AI in game development, and this likely won’t be the last studio to disclose its usage of LLMs during development.
What’s your opinion on the Big Walk controversy? Should the game still be up for awards? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Charlie is one of Insider Gaming's Guides Writers who's been in the gaming industry for a little over a year. Unfortunately for him, he enjoys every video game genre out…
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