Big Walk’s developer says LLMs contributed to well under 0.1% of its code

House House says it used large language models during the final stretch of Big Walk’s development to help solve technical problems and bugs. The studio estimates that well under 0.1% of the game’s code had any connection to that use, and says generative AI was not used in other parts of development.

The disclosure emerged amid a debate over generative AI at the Independent Games Festival. Nineteen jurors said they would not vote for games that used generative AI in any capacity, including for programming.

House House says the use was limited to technical work

The studio says it mainly used chatbots to research problems involving third-party code. In some cases, it copied snippets from LLM responses as a starting point, then modified them before incorporating them into the game.

“We’d estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage.”

- House House, Big Walk developer FAQ

The figure is the developer’s estimate, not an independently audited measurement. The studio says it did not use generative AI for art, audio or other aspects of the game.

The developer described one bug it used an LLM to investigate

House House said a shadow-rendering issue caused Big Walk to run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. The problem involved shadow casters behind the player being rendered at an effectively unlimited distance.

The team had investigated the issue and consulted a Unity engineer before asking an LLM chatbot for help. House House says the chatbot suggested a possible fix, which the team modified extensively. The studio estimates the final change represented about 10 lines of code inside Unity’s rendering pipeline.

The disclosure followed an IGF jury statement

The IGF jurors’ statement said its signatories would decline to vote for any game that used generative AI. Their position covers code assistance as well as AI-generated art or audio.

That statement is the jurors’ position, not an announced rule change from the festival. House House said it had included a similar disclosure in its IGF submission and added the explanation to its public FAQ after the issue became a matter of public interest.

House House says it lacked an AI policy

The studio said Big Walk was developed without an internal AI policy and called that a failure. It says it plans to create a more comprehensive policy for future work.

House House also expressed concern that voluntary disclosures could help normalize the technology. The team said it supports efforts to limit generative AI’s harms and apologized to people who feel its use in Big Walk does not meet their standards.