Big Walk studio says it used AI ‘sparingly’ in response to indie award jury statement against its use

Big Walk studio House House has confirmed that it used AI during the development of the game, following an anti-AI statement from jury members of a notable indie game award.

The Independent Games Festival has recently been discussing the entries for the upcoming 29th IGF Awards, with particular debate arising around the use of AI in development.

On Monday, a statement co-signed by 19 of the IGF jury members was posted, declaring that following “some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools”, all 19 were “declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity”.

Following the statement, claims on social media started to emerge suggesting that Big Walk was one of the major reasons for the debate, because House House reportedly confirmed in its submission to the IGF that it had used AI for some coding.

Now, in a separate statement provided to Aftermath then added to the game’s official FAQ, House House has confirmed that it did indeed use large language models (LLMs) to help it troubleshoot bugs.

“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,” it said.

“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 statement said the studio mainly used AI “to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code”, going on to give a detailed example of a situation where it was trying to fix a slowdown bug and, after both its own staff and a Unity engineer were unable to solve it, it turned to a chatbot for the fix.

House House added that it had written a similar disclosure when submitting its entry to the IGF, and that the reason it had never declared AI use on the game’s Steam page was because “the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage”, adding: “We are posting this disclosure as it has become a matter of public interest.”

The studio went on to state that, despite using AI in development itself, it was worried that by disclosing the use of such tools it might be helping to make their use seem acceptable.

“This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal,” it said. “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.”

While some argue that there’s a difference between using generative AI to create images and audio in games, and using it for coding, others believe that the use of any type of AI at all is unacceptable.

This is addressed in the IGF jury members’ statement, which stressed that using AI for code was “not an exception”, saying: “Programming is a creative discipline whose labour deserves the same respect we extend to any part of making a game. This extends to the past work used to train these models without the creators’ consent.”