Australian indie studio House used generative AI tools during the final stage of development on Big Walk.
Submissions for the festival closed on September 13, and finalists are scheduled for announcement in January 2027, according to Gamesindustry.
The developer clarified its workflow after a group of jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival announced they would decline votes for any submitted game developed with generative AI, as reported by Aftermath.
House explained that chatbots and large language models were deployed primarily to research issues encountered with third-party code.
Developers told Aftermath that LLMs were used sparingly by House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs
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The studio estimated that well under 0.1% of the game’s codebase involved this usage. Generative AI was not utilized in any other context throughout production.
In some instances, code snippets originating from LLM responses served as a starting point before being modified into actual game code.
Jurors noted on social media that they observed a rise in submitted video games incorporating generative AI tools. They called on the festival to implement an anti-AI policy barring entries containing any AI-generated work for future events. This resulted in discussions and disagreements across the judge and jury pools, ultimately centering around Big Walk after news of its development process emerged.
House detailed a specific bug involving the Unity URP engine, where shadow casters behind the player rendered at infinite distance and slowed the game by 50% around sunrise and sunset.
The studio researched the issue extensively and examined the URP code independently without finding a solution.
After consulting directly with an engineer at Unity who concluded the desired behavior was impossible, the team turned to an LLM chatbot.
The chatbot suggested a potential fix after multiple dead ends.
The developer stated that disclosures were omitted on Steam because the platform does not request information regarding code or chatbot usage. House published the details due to public interest, having written a version of the disclosure for the IGF as part of the submission process.
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.
House, Developer