Big Walk used AI for under 0.1% of its code, House House says

Studio confirms limited chatbot use

House House, the Melbourne team known for Untitled Goose Game, has published a disclosure about how it used AI tools while finishing Big Walk. According to Notebookcheck, the studio estimates that well under 0.1 percent of the game's code came from this work, and says generative AI played no other role in the project.

The statement appeared on 10 November 2026 as a new AI section in the game's FAQ. It landed one day after 19 jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival announced they would refuse to vote for any entry made with generative AI in any capacity.

Big Walk, a cooperative adventure published by Panic, shipped on 4 August 2026 for Windows, Mac, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2.

How the jurors learned of the disclosure

The jurors' statement, which was shared on Bluesky by Austin Walker and signed by figures including Her Story creator Sam Barlow, did not name any specific title. It was a personal pledge by the signatories, who do not represent the festival itself.

Developer Bruno Dias later wrote on Bluesky that IGF judges had learned about the chatbot use in Big Walk through the festival's submission process, which asks entrants to disclose such tools. That connection appears to have prompted House House to publish its own account publicly.

What the AI was actually used for

In the FAQ, House House explains that its main use of chatbots was researching problems in third-party code. Occasionally, a snippet from a chatbot answer served as a starting point that the team then rewrote into the game itself.

The studio describes one concrete case. Unity's Universal Render Pipeline, the system that handles much of the game's graphics, only removed shadow-casting objects by distance in front of the camera. Objects behind the player were therefore drawn as if infinitely far away, which slowed the game by 50 percent for roughly 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset.

House House could not solve the problem, and an engineer at Unity concluded there was no fix. A chatbot then proposed an approach which, after heavy editing, became about 10 lines of code inside the render pipeline.

Why Steam shows no AI label

House House says it treated the AI disclosure as a suggested part of its IGF entry rather than a general obligation. It did not add a disclosure on Steam because Valve's form does not ask developers to report code written with chatbots.

According to Notebookcheck, Valve revised its Steam disclosure form in January 2026 to clarify that efficiency gains from AI-powered development tools fall outside the scope of what it wants reported. That distinction explains why the game carries no AI notice on the store page despite the studio's statement.

House House responds to the criticism

In its statement, the studio says it supports efforts to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and the wider world, and apologises that its own use of the tools may fall short of the standard the jurors have set.

House House also calls its decision to ship Big Walk without an internal policy on AI usage a failure, and commits to developing a more thorough one. The episode highlights a growing tension in the industry: disclosure rules differ between festivals and storefronts, and even a fraction of a percent of AI-assisted code can now become a public issue when juries take a hard line.