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# Big Walk developer House House apologises for generative AI usage that split awards jury
- URL: https://www.verticalslice.news/big-walk-developer-house-house-apologises-for-generative-ai-usage-that-split-awards-jury/
- Published: 2026-11-10T08:45:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-10T08:45:31.000Z
- Description: The studio has confirmed it used suggestions from LLM chatbots to overcome some technical issues.
- Author: Chris Kerr
- Tags: News, Production, Generative AI

House House has confirmed it leaned on outputs from LLM chatbots to untangle some technical issues and bugs when developing celebrated social stroller *Big Walk*.

The admission comes after 19 members of the Independent Game Festival (IGF) jury [published an open letter](https://www.verticalslice.news/we-feel-responsible-to-push-past-defeatism-igf-jurors-call-on-award-organisers-to-adopt-anti-ai-policy/) calling on organisers to adopt a strong anti-AI stance. Signatories said they will not be voting for submissions that used generative AI technology in any way, shape, or form—including to assist with coding. 

Now, we know they were referencing *Big Walk*. 

[In a statement to Aftermath](https://www.verticalslice.news/we-feel-responsible-to-push-past-defeatism-igf-jurors-call-on-award-organisers-to-adopt-anti-ai-policy/), House House said under 0.1 percent of *Big Walk's* code was influenced by generative AI, but acknowledged that leaning on the technology even a little would be considered a failure by some.

Notably, House House explained it primarily leveraged LLMs in the form of chatbots to research issues it encountered with third-party tools, such as Unity's Universal Render Pipeline. It then purportedly used those responses as a "starting point" before iterating on their outputs.

The studio said it didn't disclose its use of generative AI on Steam because the platform does not ask developers to reveal code or chatbot usage. 

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.