Aussie Hit Big Walk Admits a Sliver of AI Code, and Indie Awards Jurors Are Drawing a Hard Line

Big Walk, the co-op hiking-and-yarning game from Australian studio House House, has admitted it used AI chatbots in the final stretch of development. The studio reckons well under 0.1% of the game’s code had anything to do with it.

That tiny sliver has still landed one of 2026’s best-reviewed games in the middle of the nastiest argument in indie gaming right now. A group of Independent Games Festival (IGF) jurors has said it won’t vote for any game that used generative AI “in any capacity”, and code is not getting a pass.

What House House actually admitted

The statement now sits in the official Big Walk FAQ, under the question “Was AI used to make Big Walk?” House House first gave it to Aftermath, and says a version of it was originally written for the game’s IGF submission.

• The use: LLMs were used “sparingly” to help work through “difficult technical challenges and bugs”, mostly by researching problems with third-party code via chatbots.
• The code: In some cases, snippets from chatbot responses were copied as a starting point and then modified into game code.
• The size: House House estimates “well under 0.1%” of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with it, and says generative AI was not used anywhere else in the game.
• The example: A Unity URP shadow-culling problem made the game run 50% slower for about 20 seconds at every sunrise and sunset. A Unity engineer told the team it couldn’t be done, a chatbot suggested a fix, and the heavily reworked result was about 10 lines of code.
• The policy: The studio says it had no internal AI policy while making Big Walk, calls that “a failure”, and promises a proper one going forward.

It also says it never disclosed anything on Steam because Steam “does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage”. It’s only posting now because it “has become a matter of public interest”.

And it’s not exactly cheerleading. House House says the disclosure is “not an endorsement” of AI tools, and apologises that its usage “may not meet” the standards of people fighting generative AI in games.

Why the IGF jury is involved

The row kicked off when a group of IGF jurors put out a signed statement, posted on Bluesky by former games journalist and developer Austin Walker, according to Game Informer. It says voting has been tough this year because of a “significant increase” in games made with generative AI tools.

• The stance: The signatories are “declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity” this year.
• Code included: The statement says “AI-generated code is not an exception to these harms”.
• The ask: It urges the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy that bans games containing any AI-generated work in future years.
• Not everyone signed: The jurors say some colleagues didn’t sign, partly over fears of professional blowback.
• The date: The IGF awards are on 3 March 2027 US time, according to Game Informer, which will likely be 4 March here.

The statement doesn’t name a single game. But IGF juror Kyle LeClair told Aftermath that the most-discussed game this year “almost entirely involved its AI usage”, and developer Bruno Diaz then confirmed on Bluesky that the game was Big Walk, according to Game Informer.

Diaz also said the disclosure was required by IGF rules, and that House House described several instances of LLM use rather than one bug fix, though mostly “consultative” use. He added that, as far as he knows, Big Walk isn’t breaking Steam’s AI disclosure rules.

The game caught in the middle

• The studio: House House, the Australian team that made Untitled Goose Game in 2019.
• The release: Big Walk came out on 4 August 2026 on PC and Mac (Steam and the Mac App Store), PS5 and Switch 2, published by Panic.
• The price: 29.99 New Zealand dollars on Steam in NZ.
• The reception: It sits on a Metacritic score of 91 on its Steam page, and Nintendo Life reports it sold a million copies in under a week.
• No Xbox: House House has previously said it isn’t releasing Big Walk on Xbox because of the BDS boycott of Microsoft, according to Game Informer and Nintendo Life.

Big Walk was built in Unity, the engine Saudi money is now reportedly circling. If you want the bigger picture on how hard AI is being shoved into game development, our GetRekt Special on the AI takeover of gaming covers the engines, the clones and the indies caught in the middle.

Our take

The jurors aren’t wrong about the bigger problem. Steam is drowning in AI slop, and the bloody least a studio can do is tell you when a chatbot was involved, before an awards body drags it out of them.

But lumping 10 lines of shadow-culling code in with AI-generated art and voice acting is daft. By House House’s own account, it asked Unity first, got told it was impossible, then used a chatbot like a smarter Stack Overflow and rewrote what it got.

The studio’s grovelling apology says more about how toxic this fight has become than about Big Walk. If one of the most-praised games of the year is now the poster child for AI in games, the line needs drawing somewhere sensible, and “any capacity” ain’t it.

Fair call by the jurors, or an absolute overreaction to a rounding error? Come argue about it in the GetRekt Discord. Everything else lives on our Big Walk page.

Sources

• House House: Big Walk FAQ, “Was AI used to make Big Walk?”
• Aftermath: Big Walk used AI in “the final stretch” of development, kicking off intense awards debate
• Game Informer: House House discloses AI use for under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code following IGF voting controversy
• Nintendo Life: Big Walk devs issue statement over AI usage
• VGC: Big Walk studio says it used AI “sparingly”
• Steam: Big Walk store page
• House House (YouTube): Big Walk – Release Date Announcement