AI use in video games has never been a more hotly debated topic, and much like last year with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, its masked use during development has impacted one of this year’s Game of the Year frontrunners, Big Walk. Turns out AI was used during Big Walk’s development, and it’s the game’s disqualification from the Independent Game Festival’s GOTY consideration that has led to that unfortunate discovery.

The IGF posted a statement (thanks, Aftermath) regarding its nominations this year, highlighting that some who vote for its GOTY nominees and award winners simply won’t consider games that used generative AI during their development. It seemed a fairly straightforward, somewhat expected stance. However, it became clear in the hours after that statement was posted that the reason IGF representatives were having such a tough time deliberating is because AI was used during Big Walk’s development.

That revelation has led to Big Walk studio House House updating its FAQ to confirm that yes, AI was used during the game’s development process, and to explain how exactly it was implemented.

“In the final stretch of Big Walk’s development, LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs,” the new FAQ section reads.

LLM stands for large language model, AIs that are trained on vast amounts of text to help summarize, translate, and in some cases generate language.

“In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point to be modified into game code - we’d estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage, and generative AI was not used in any other context when making the game.”

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