House House says LLMs touched "well under 0.1%" of Big Walk's code, right after a group of IGF jurors vowed not to vote for any game that uses generative AI "in any capacity." It's a values fight from a studio that already drew a hard line with Xbox players.
Big Walk was one of the indie darlings of 2026. Now it’s at the center of the nastiest awards fight of the season, and the studio behind it is apologizing.
House House, the team that made Untitled Goose Game, confirmed to Aftermath that it used large language models “in the final stretch” of Big Walk’s development. The studio says LLMs “were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs,” and estimates that “well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage.” It also stresses that “generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.”
The timing is the whole story. On November 9, a group of 19 named jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival awards, including Austin Walker and Sam Barlow, put out a statement saying they are “declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity.” They made no exception for code, writing that “Programming is a creative discipline whose labour deserves the same respect we extend to any part of making a game.” They also said the rise in AI-assisted submissions had “set off some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools.” The jurors were clear they don’t speak for the IGF as an organization or for every juror, and they urged the IGF to ban AI-made work in future years.
The statement never named a game. Within hours, social media had pinned much of that “intense discussion” on Big Walk.
No, it was not disqualified
A post claiming Big Walk got “DQ’d” from the IGF went viral overnight, pulling in nearly 9,000 likes. That’s not what happened. Nothing from the IGF says Big Walk was removed. What happened is that some jurors pledged not to vote for any AI-assisted game, and House House’s own disclosure puts Big Walk in that group for those jurors.
Windows Central’s Jez Corden, quoting that viral post, cut right to it: “Pretty sure almost every game on Earth is using gen ai in some capacity, especially for coding above all, no? Live by the sword die by the sword and all that though…”
What House House actually did
The studio gave a surprisingly specific example. Big Walk was running 50% slower for about 20 seconds at every sunrise and sunset, because Unity’s URP renderer was drawing shadows from objects behind the player at infinite distance. House House says it researched the problem, dug through the URP code, and even talked to an engineer at Unity, who concluded the fix it wanted wasn’t possible. Then it asked an LLM chatbot. “After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked,” the studio wrote. The fix came to about 10 lines of code.
House House says it disclosed this in its IGF submission, but not on Steam, because Steam “does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage.” It went public now because the issue “has become a matter of public interest,” and it called its lack of an internal AI policy “a failure.” It even apologized to the anti-AI crowd: “We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.”
Why Xbox players are paying attention
This is the same studio that kept Big Walk off Xbox. Earlier this fall, House House said, per Polygon, “We would love for people to be able to play the game on Xbox, but not until Microsoft and/or Xbox have been removed as BDS boycott targets.” Celeste and TowerFall got pulled from the Xbox Store over the same boycott shortly after.
So here’s our take. House House chose to put a values test on where its game could be played, and Xbox players paid for that choice by being shut out. Now the studio is on the other end of a values test it says it supports, over about 10 lines of chatbot-assisted code that fixed a shadow bug. That’s exactly Jez’s point. Purity tests don’t stop where you want them to, and they tend to land hardest on the people who signed up for them.
To be fair to House House, it was honest when it didn’t have to be. Steam didn’t ask, and the studio told everyone anyway, with receipts. If the standard for an indie award is “no AI in any capacity,” a lot of studios that quietly used a chatbot to fix a bug are about to have a very awkward awards season. The real winner here should be disclosure, not the pile-on. And Xbox players? We’ll keep playing the games that actually want us around.
Image: House House
Sources
- Aftermath: Big Walk Used AI In ‘The Final Stretch’ Of Development, Kicking Off Intense Awards Debate (Nov 10, 2026)
- Aftermath: Some IGF Jurors Are ‘Declining To Vote For Any Game That Uses Generative AI In Any Capacity’ (Nov 9, 2026)
- Nintendo Life: Big Walk Devs Issue Statement Over AI Usage
- Polygon: Celeste and TowerFall delisted from Xbox (Oct 29, 2026), with House House’s Big Walk Xbox statement
- Jez Corden on X
- Viral “DQ’d” post quoted by Jez Corden
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