Big Walk Used AI In 'The Final Stretch' Of Development, Kicking Off Intense Awards Debate

The disclosure came after 19 jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival published a joint statement saying they would decline to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. The jurors said they had seen a "significant increase in the number of submitted games developed with generative AI tools" and urged IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years. Big Walk was among the games submitted before the September 13 deadline, with finalists due to be announced in January 2027.

Kyle "SlyDante" LeClair, a four-time IGF judge, wrote that "the most-discussed game this year" during voting "almost entirely involved its AI usage." While the game was unnamed, commenters on BlueSky pointed to Big Walk. Fallen London lead designer Bruno Diaz then confirmed that IGF judges were made "aware of the LLM use in the development of Big Walk" by House House because "disclosure was required by IGF rules."

House House updated Big Walk's FAQ page, adding a section titled "Was AI used to make Big Walk?" The studio said large language models were used "sparingly" during the "final stretch of Big Walk's development" to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs. In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point and modified into game code. House House estimated that "well under 0.1 percent 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 studio gave a concrete example: a shadow-caster culling issue in Unity URP that made the game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. After researching the problem and consulting a Unity engineer who concluded the fix wasn't possible, they posed the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix that worked after extensive modification, representing about 10 lines of code inside URP.

House House said it did not disclose the AI use on Steam because "the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage" and updated the FAQ "as it has become a matter of public interest." The developer stressed the statement is "not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal" and apologized that Big Walk's LLM usage "may not meet" the standards of those trying to limit generative AI's harm. The studio acknowledged it developed Big Walk without an internal AI usage policy, calling that lack of policy "a failure," and said it will work to have a more comprehensive policy going forward.