House House disclosed that Big Walk used large language models sparingly during development to solve technical problems, revealing the practice only now because "it has become a matter of public interest." The studio used LLMs to work through difficult technical challenges and bugs, with less than 0.1% of the game's code involving this usage.
House House cited a specific example: Unity's shadow caster rendering pipeline caused the game to run at half speed during sunrise and sunset. After a Unity engineer said the problem was impossible to fix, House House consulted an LLM chatbot. The chatbot's suggestion required extensive modification but produced a working fix of about 10 lines of code.
The studio stated that generative AI was not used in any other context during development. House House also noted they had no internal AI usage policy in place and called this "a failure," saying they will develop a more comprehensive policy going forward.
House House did not disclose AI usage on Steam because the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. The disclosure comes as several Independent Games Festival jurors, including Austin Walker, Sam Barlow, and Lena Reine, signed a statement declining to vote for any game using generative AI in any capacity. Liz Ryerson confirmed Big Walk was under consideration by the IGF and was discussed during judging regarding its genAI use.