House House has confirmed that large language models were used sparingly during the final stage of Big Walk’s development, with the Australian studio saying the technology helped investigate difficult technical problems and bugs.
The developer added the disclosure to the official Big Walk FAQ after the issue became a matter of public interest.
House House said well under 0.1 per cent of the game’s code was connected to the use of language models, and that generative AI was not used in any other part of the game’s production.
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What House House says AI was used for
House House described the use as a technical troubleshooting measure rather than a source of art, writing, dialogue, music or other player-facing content.
The studio said its main use of chatbots was researching problems involving third-party code.
In some cases, developers copied snippets from language-model responses as starting points before modifying them for the game.
One example involved the game’s handling of shadow casters in Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline, or URP.
House House said the problem caused Big Walk to run about 50 per cent slower for roughly 20 seconds around sunrise and sunset because shadow casters behind the player continued to be rendered.
The team said it investigated the issue, examined the relevant URP code and consulted a Unity engineer before asking a language model for another possible approach.
According to the studio, the eventual suggestion required extensive modification but produced a working fix involving about 10 lines of code inside URP.
Why the disclosure matters
The statement places Big Walk inside a wider debate about whether any use of generative AI should affect eligibility for independent-game awards, including when the technology is used only during programming or debugging.
House House said it originally prepared a version of the disclosure as part of its submission to the Independent Games Festival competition rules, which is scheduled to hold its 29th awards programme during the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco from March 1 to March 4, 2027.
The studio said Steam does not require developers to disclose code-related chatbot use, which is why the information did not appear on the game’s store listing.
The FAQ disclosure was posted after the subject attracted wider attention.
House House also stressed that the statement was not intended as an endorsement of AI development tools.
The studio said it supports efforts to limit the harms associated with generative AI in games and acknowledged that the use may not meet the standards of people opposed to the technology in any capacity.
House House plans an internal AI policy
The developer said Big Walk was made without an internal policy governing AI use and called that absence a failure.
House House said it plans to establish a more comprehensive policy for future projects.
That could include rules about permissible research, coding assistance, disclosure requirements and the use of generated material in creative work.
The distinction between technical assistance and player-facing content is becoming increasingly important for game studios as festivals, storefronts and players adopt different approaches to AI disclosure.
In House House’s account, the technology played a narrow role in solving a performance problem and did not generate the game’s creative assets.
The studio’s own estimate, however, treats even that limited coding assistance as significant enough to disclose.
Big Walk remains available on four platforms
Big Walk launched on August 4, 2026, and is available for Windows and Mac, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, according to the game’s official FAQ.
The cooperative adventure supports between two and 12 players and is designed around in-game voice and text communication rather than external chat applications.
The AI disclosure does not announce a recall, content change or platform restriction.
It clarifies how a small portion of the game’s code was produced and signals that House House expects to handle similar questions more formally in future development.
The next significant development will be how the disclosure is treated within the 2027 Independent Games Festival process and whether other studios provide comparable information about AI-assisted programming or debugging.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did House House use AI to make Big Walk?
House House says it used large language models sparingly during the final stage of development to investigate technical problems and bugs, not to create the game’s art, writing, dialogue or other player-facing content.
How much of Big Walk’s code involved AI assistance?
The studio estimates that well under 0.1 per cent of Big Walk’s code was connected to language-model use.
What problem did AI help House House solve?
House House says a language model helped suggest an approach to a Unity URP shadow-culling problem that caused major slowdowns around sunrise and sunset.
Was Big Walk’s AI use disclosed on Steam?
No. House House says Steam does not request disclosure of code or chatbot use, so the studio added the information to its official FAQ instead.
Will House House change its AI practices?
House House says it plans to create a more comprehensive internal AI-use policy for future projects.
Fact-Checked: Key details were checked against House House’s official Big Walk FAQ and the Independent Games Festival’s official competition information.
Disclaimer: The article describes House House’s account of its development process and does not independently audit the game’s source code.