Big Walk generative AI disclosure House House, Digi Mart USA News (Melbourne, Australia): House House, the Melbourne studio behind Untitled Goose Game, has confirmed that large language models were used in the final stretch of development on Big Walk, a cooperative adventure published by Panic on August 4, 2026, for Windows, Mac, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2.
The studio added an AI section to the game’s FAQ on November 10, a day after 19 jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival said they would decline to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. According to the FAQ, the studio mainly used chatbots to research problems with third-party code, and in some cases copied snippets from LLM responses as a starting point before modifying them into game code.
House House estimates that well under 0.1 percent of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage and says generative AI was not used in any other context. The studio gives one example: Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline culled shadow casters only by distance in the camera’s forward direction, causing objects behind the player to render at an infinite distance and slowing the game by 50 percent for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset.
After House House could not find a fix, and an Unity engineer concluded one was not possible, a chatbot suggested an approach that became about 10 lines of code after extensive modification.
House House says it wrote the disclosure as part of its IGF submission and made none on Steam, because the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. The studio said it supports efforts to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames, apologised that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet those standards, and called shipping without an internal AI usage policy “a failure,” adding that it will work toward a more comprehensive one.
The disclosure followed a statement shared on Bluesky by Austin Walker and signed by Her Story creator Sam Barlow, among others, which did not name a game. Developer Bruno Dias later wrote that IGF judges were made aware of LLM use in Big Walk through the festival’s submission disclosure, and the statement’s signatories do not speak for the IGF.
