The last few years have seen significant debate over the widespread use of AI-powered tools in game development and the responsible disclosure of that usage to players. That debate has exploded into a full-blown controversy in the indie game development space this week, as Big Walk developer House House has publicly and belatedly disclosed minimal AI use in its popular co-operative puzzle exploration game.
This particular controversy has been brewing behind the scenes for months, as judges and jury members for the prestigious Independent Games Festival Awards discussed the issue in private discussion groups. But the debate started to break into public view on Monday when 19 members of the 50-plus-member jury released a signed statement outlining a stance “declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity.”
Noting “a significant increase in the number of submitted games developer with generative AI tools,” the group of jurors called out AI’s ecological, economic, psychological, and labor harms in rejecting tools whose use, they said, is still “not a foregone conclusion in our industry.”
The jurors also urged the IGF as a whole to “adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.”
The big walkback
Although the jurors’ statement didn’t name any specific games, by Tuesday morning, one critical darling in particular was increasingly being noted as a central part of the debate. In a statement provided to Aftermath (and added to the game’s FAQ page shortly thereafter), developer House House admitted publicly that “LLMs were used sparingly” near the end of Big Walk‘s development “to help work through some difficult technical challenges and bugs.”
That limited AI use—which House House says represents “well under 0.1% of Big Walk‘s code—stemmed in part from a thorny Unity engine bug that was slowing the game down with “infinite length” shadows during some game situations. After consulting with a Unity engineer who determined a fix “wasn’t possible,” House House said it consulted an LLM chatbot, which suggested a possible fix that the developers “had to modify… extensively” into the 10 lines of code that ended up in the final game (At least one social media user says the bug was indeed fixable with significant human effort, though).
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