Big Walk, Indie GOTY Contender, Admits AI Use and Opens Wound in Gaming Community

The most critically acclaimed game of the year in the indie circuit was not only a commercial and critical success — it was also a case study in the weight of tradition in gaming. Big Walk, by Australian studio House House (best known for Untitled Goose Game), arrived at the final weeks of development with a clear promise: no artificial intelligence in the creative process. What happened in those final weeks, however, changed everything.

The conflict began when 19 members of the Independent Games Festival (IGF) jury — including names like Sam Barlow and Lena Raine — published a joint statement saying they would refuse to vote for any game that used generative AI "in any capacity." The justification was firm: there had been "a significant increase in the number of games submitted developed with generative AI," and jurors considered that its use was "neither an inevitability nor entirely voluntary" in their industry. The group called on the IGF to adopt a "strong anti-AI policy for future years, that disallows games containing AI-generated work."

The statement was published on November 9, and within hours the festival's own transparency mechanism did its work. House House had mentioned generative AI in its IGF submission — something Steam does not require, as the platform does not ask about code or chatbot usage. The jurors' declaration forced the issue, and House House ended up updating its official website FAQ with a new and specific section: "Was AI used to make Big Walk?"

The answer was one of the most detailed documents an indie studio has ever published on the topic. The studio confirmed that LLMs (large language models) were used "sparingly" during "the final stretch of development," specifically to "work through difficult technical challenges and bugs." In some cases, snippets of AI responses were copied as starting points before being modified by developers. The estimate? Well under 0.1% of Big Walk's code has any relation to this usage, and generative AI was not employed in any other context.

The concrete example House House provided is revealing. The developers needed to optimize shadow culling in the Unity URP: shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at infinite distance, making the game run 50% slower for about 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. After researching extensively, consulting Unity engineers, and trying multiple approaches, the devs asked an AI chatbot. The response helped identify that what they wanted was simply not possible within URP's limitations.

What makes this case unique is not the use of AI per se — Untitled Goose Game and many other indie games had already been developed with AI-assisted tools — but the scale of controversy that such a tiny revelation triggered. The discussion already spilled out of jury rooms and into Steam review sections, where Big Walk received 156 negative reviews in a single day, with only 36% being positive. Bruno Dias, from the team, cautioned against characterizing this revelation as a blocking bug, noting that the use was "consultative" and not generative.

House House did not defend itself. It acknowledged that the game was developed "without an internal AI usage policy in place," and considered that absence a "failure." The studio apologized to those working to "limit the harm generative AI is doing to video games and our world," and admitted that "voluntary disclosures like this might contribute to the normalization of this technology."

The question that remains is not whether House House should or should not have used LLMs for debugging. It is whether the indie gaming industry is prepared for a future where the distinction between "development tool" and "content generator" becomes increasingly thin — and whether award juries will need to define levels of use, not just binary prohibitions. So far, the IGF's response has been silent: there has been no official disqualification, only the possibility that 19 jurors will independently decide not to vote for Big Walk. For a game competing for Indie Game of the Year, that could be more devastating than any institutional verdict.

What happens when the biggest controversy at an indie festival is not about the quality of the game, but about how many lines of code were generated by a chatbot? The answer will likely define the future of the award for years.

Sources: The Verge, Aftermath, GamesIndustry.biz

✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing