Big Walk AI Usage: House House Admits LLM Help With Bugs

The Big Walk AI usage question went from a footnote to a headline in two days. Developer House House now admits it used LLM chatbots “sparingly” near the end of development. Meanwhile, a group of Independent Games Festival jurors says it will not vote for any game made with generative AI.

To begin with, the statement sits in the game’s official FAQ under the question “Was AI used to make Big Walk?”. According to the studio, LLMs helped it “work through difficult technical challenges and bugs” in the final stretch.

In some cases, the team copied snippets from chatbot answers as a starting point. After that, it rewrote them into game code. Besides that, generative AI was not used anywhere else, the studio says, so there is no AI art, voice or writing in the game.

Notably, House House did not defend the choice. “This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal,” the statement reads.

Yes, but only a little, according to House House. The studio estimates that “well under 0.1%” of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with LLM help.

For the most part, that use was research. The team asked chatbots about problems in third-party code it could not change easily. In other words, the AI worked more like a search engine than a co-developer.

Even so, the admission landed hard. After all, Big Walk launched on August 4, 2026, from the studio behind Untitled Goose Game, and it was already on many year-end shortlists.

House House shared one concrete example. Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline could only cull shadow casters in front of the camera. As a result, shadows behind the player rendered at an infinite distance.

Because of that, the game ran 50% slower for about 20 seconds at every sunrise and sunset. First, the team dug through the URP code itself. Next, it asked an engineer at Unity, who concluded the fix was not possible.

Finally, the developers asked an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested an approach that worked once the team “had to modify the suggestion extensively”. The final fix was about 10 lines of code inside URP.

The timing is what turned a small disclosure into news. On November 9, Aftermath reported that 19 jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival signed a statement against generative AI in games.

In short, they say they are “declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity”. Crucially, they make no exception for code. However, the jurors do not speak for the IGF itself, and the festival lets each juror vote by their own values.

House House says it first wrote its disclosure as a suggested part of its IGF submission. Here is how the week unfolded.

At the same time, many players asked why the store page never mentioned AI. House House’s answer is short: Steam “does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage”.

Indeed, that matches Valve’s current rules, which focus on AI content players actually see or hear. For context, read our report on Valve’s stance on AI games and why Steam does not filter them.

Still, the studio admits a deeper gap. “Big Walk was developed without an internal AI usage policy in place, and we consider that lack of policy a failure,” it wrote, promising a fuller policy going forward.

So far, the backlash is real but small next to the game’s overall reception. GamesRadar+ reported refund requests and a wave of negative Steam reviews on November 10.

On the morning of November 11, the Steam store page showed 94% positive across 30,515 English reviews. By comparison, the last 30 days stood at 87% positive across 4,748 reviews. Figures checked on November 11, 2026.

In fact, most new complaints target the late disclosure rather than the code itself. That gap between trust and technology is the real AI in video games controversy here.

For players, the takeaway is simple. “Made with AI” now covers everything from AI art to one chatbot answer, so read the developer’s own statement before you judge a game.

For developers, on the other hand, the lesson is sharper. If you use an AI coding assistant even once, write down a policy and decide what you will disclose before an award form or a reporter asks. House House learned that after launch.

If you build games yourself, compare the assistants developers actually use in our guide to the best AI coding tools. For the opposite approach, see why the Godot engine banned AI-written code from its own project.

Sources

Big Walk official FAQ, “Was AI used to make Big Walk?”, Aftermath (November 10, 2026), Aftermath on the IGF juror statement (November 9, 2026), GamesRadar+ (November 10, 2026), Steam store page (checked November 11, 2026). *Photos: Independent Games Festival 2025 awards (Consume Me team on the IGF stage, used as an illustration, not House House) by Official GDC, CC BY 2.0, cropped and resized; Independent Games Festival 2026 awards (Housefire Games, used as an illustration) by Official GDC, CC BY 4.0, cropped and resized.*