As one of the highest rated indie games of the year, Big Walk was expected to reign supreme when it came to awards season for 2026. That won’t be the case though, as the Independent Games Festival (IGF) announced it will have a zero tolerance policy for games made with any form of AI for the upcoming 29th IGF awards. What does that have to do with Big Walk? Well, it turns out developer House House utilized AI to bug fix some of the game, which disqualifies it from the IGF awards.
This whole story started yesterday when the IGF released its statement about “Declining to Vote for Any Game That Uses Generative AI in Any Capacity.” Aftermath provided a rather typical blog post on it, which most of the internet agreed with. Then this morning, House House came out and disclosed that it had used AI during “the final stretch” of development on Big Walk to “help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs.” The developer even provided a statement to Aftermath clarifying how it used AI.
“In the final stretch of Big Walk’s development, LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs,” the developer told the outlet. “In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point to be modified into game code—we’d estimate that well under 0.1% 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 reason this statement is coming out now? It’s likely because Big Walk was disqualified after House House submitted it to the IGF awards, so the company wants to get ahead of any discussions. So, how did the game get as far as releasing on different digital platforms without disclosing its AI usage? Steam, for instance, requires developers disclose how AI was used in creating different projects. Apparently, though, Steam does not demand disclose if a chatbot is used for game code. “We have not made any disclosure on Steam as the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage,” House House writes. “We are posting this disclosure as it has become a matter of public interest.” Bummer.
“This is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal,” the team writes. “We have some concern that voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalisation of this technology, or its treatment as ‘inevitable.’ We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.”
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
