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Big Walk studio says it used AI ‘sparingly’ in response to indie award jury statement against its use
House House has confirmed that it used large language models during the final stages of making Big Walk, after 19 Independent Games Festival jurors said they would not vote for games using generative AI in any capacity. The disclosure has renewed debate over whether AI-assisted coding should count as generative AI use in game development.
The studio said it used chatbots to investigate technical problems and bugs, and that snippets from their responses were modified as starting points for code. It estimates this affected well under 0.1% of the game’s code and says AI was not used in other parts of development. House House apologised to those whose standards its use may not meet and said it would introduce a more comprehensive AI policy.
In short
- House House says AI touched well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code.
- It used chatbots to help troubleshoot technical problems and bugs.
- Nineteen IGF jurors oppose voting for games using generative AI.
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
The jurors’ position can be defended as a clear, consistent standard: if a game’s creators used generative AI at any stage, voters should be free to judge it against their stated principles, regardless of how little code was affected. A categorical rule may also help address concerns about transparency, training data and the wider effects of the technology, which are difficult to resolve by measuring its share of a finished game.
The case against
House House’s account supports drawing a distinction between limited assistance with debugging and using AI to generate a game’s creative content. The studio says the code involved was a tiny fraction of the whole, was modified by developers and did not involve other parts of development; on that view, treating all such uses alike could obscure differences in scale and purpose, and penalise routine technical experimentation.
Explained simply
The Independent Games Festival is an annual event that recognises independent video games, with jurors choosing which titles to shortlist and award. Generative AI refers to computer systems that produce text, images or code in response to prompts; developers may use such tools to help with technical tasks as well as creative work.
House House is the Australian independent studio behind Big Walk. The discussion centres on where to draw the line between using AI to assist with coding and using it to create a game’s content, and whether either should affect how a game is judged for an award.