House House, the beloved Australian developer behind Untitled Goose Game and the breakout 2026 indie hit Big Walk, has updated its FAQ page to confirm that “[Large Language Models] were used sparingly” during Big Walk’s development “to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs.”
The confirmation was seemingly triggered by a joint statement published by a “contingent” of jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival. As spotted by Aftermath, 19 of IGF’s jurors, in a statement approved by “IGF leadership,” announced they were “declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity.”
In a separate statement, Kyle “SlyDante” LeClair, a “four-time IGF judge,” noted that “the most-discussed game this year” during IGF’s voting process “almost entirely involved its AI usage.” While the game in question was unnamed, several commenters on BlueSky confidently pointed the finger at House House’s Big Walk.
Fallen London lead designer and Pathologic 2 localization writer Bruno Diaz then confirmed that, because “the cat is out of the fucking bag,” IGF judges were made “aware of the LLM use in the development of Big Walk” by House House, as “disclosure was required by IGF rules.” House House then updated Big Walk’s FAQ page to confirm that LLMs were used during the game’s development. Based on archival snapshots of the FAQ, the section outlining this was added sometime after October 23, 2026.
The newly added section, titled “Was AI used to make Big Walk?”, explains that LLMs were only used during the “final stretch of Big Walk’s development” to help with bug fixing: “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 percent 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.”
House House also explains in the FAQ that the developers did not disclose their use of LLMs on Steam “as the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage,” and the developer had updated Big Walk’s FAQ “as it has become a matter of public interest.”
However, the developer concluded that said statement is “not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools, however minimal,” and that House House “support[s] the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to video games and our world, and apologize that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards.”