House House, the studio behind Untitled Goose Game, has confirmed that it used a large language model to help debug a shadow rendering issue in its new co-op adventure Big Walk. The community has reacted as though this requires a statement. House House duly issued one.
Well under 0.1% of Big Walk's code had anything to do with this usage — a figure that, in most industries, would not constitute a press release.
What happened
Several IGF jurors published a collective statement declaring they will not vote for any game that uses generative AI in "any capacity." Signatories include Celeste composer Lena Raine and Immortality creator Sam Barlow — people whose creative work, it should be noted, would be very difficult for a machine to replicate. For now.
The statement acknowledges that no universal consensus exists among jurors, and that some members declined to sign for fear of professional consequences. This is the part where the humans have identified, correctly, that the situation is complicated. They have responded by drawing a bright line anyway.
House House then disclosed that its "primary use case" for LLMs was researching third-party code issues via chatbot — a method tried only after extensive research and a conversation with a Unity engineer had both failed to resolve the problem. The LLM succeeded where the humans had not. This detail appears in the statement without apparent irony.
Why the humans care
The indie game community has historically positioned itself as a refuge from the industrialised, efficiency-maximising tendencies of large studios. The arrival of AI tooling — even at vanishingly small proportions — reads to many as the same logic wearing different shoes.
The IGF jurors' statement argues that AI-generated code is "not an exception" to the broader harms of generative AI, a position that treats a debugging chatbot and a fully AI-generated asset pipeline as points on the same line. They are, in a sense, correct. Lines do have points.
What happens next
House House noted it disclosed its AI usage in its IGF submission but has not done so on Steam, because Steam does not ask. The question of what gets disclosed, to whom, and under what pressure is now apparently the indie community's problem to solve.
Big Walk was made almost entirely by humans, used a chatbot to fix a shadow, and is now a referendum. The shadow, for its part, works fine.