House House said Big Walk used generative AI only sparingly in the final stretch of development, setting up a fresh dispute over how Igf Games should handle entries that use the tools at all. The studio said the work was limited to solving difficult technical problems and bugs, and that the game's use of AI was disclosed in its Independent Games Festival submission.
The argument reached the open after some Independent Games Festival jurors published a statement saying they would not vote for games that use generative AI in any capacity. Sam Barlow was among those who signed it, and the statement was posted by Austin Walker, putting a name and a public line in a debate that had mostly circulated inside the indie game community.
House House tried to draw a narrow boundary around what happened in Big Walk's development. It said snippets from LLM responses were copied in some cases as a starting point and then modified into game code, estimating that well under 0.1% of the code had anything to do with that process. The studio said generative AI was not used in any other context while making the game, and that its main use for LLMs was researching problems with third-party code through chatbots.
It also said it had used an LLM chatbot after digging into a shadows problem extensively and speaking with an engineer at Unity. That detail matters because it shows the studio was not using the tools as a broad development shortcut, but as a last-resort technical aid after other routes had been explored. House House said it did not disclose the AI use on Big Walk's Steam page because the platform does not ask for disclosure of code or chatbot use.
Still, the studio's explanation lands in the middle of a line some jurors appear unwilling to cross. They said there had been a significant increase in games developed with generative AI tools and described the internal discussion as fairly intense, but without universal consensus. House House pushed back on the broader logic of disclosure and said it had concern that voluntary reporting could help normalize the technology or frame it as inevitable.
The immediate question is not whether Big Walk used AI — House House has already said it did — but whether that limited use will matter when IGF jurors cast their votes. The larger result is that the festival now has a public conflict it cannot ignore, and developers entering future IGF Games will have to think not only about what tools they used, but how those choices will be judged.
