House House Says It Used Generative AI "Sparingly" on Big Walk
House House has said it used generative AI "sparingly" while making Big Walk, and it disclosed that use only after the game was entered for an award for independent games.
The studio made the disclosure in a statement sent to Aftermath, a games news site. The statement followed the reaction to Big Walk's entry in the Independent Games Festival (IGF), an annual awards event for independent games. Generative AI refers to tools that create text, images or code from prompts. The studio's main tools in this case were large language models, the chatbot systems that produce written answers.
According to Eurogamer, House House said LLMs were used in the final stretch of Big Walk's development. The team used them to work through difficult technical challenges and bugs, which are errors in the code. The studio said its main use was to research problems with third-party code, meaning code written by other companies that the game relies on. Developers did this by asking chatbots about those issues.
House House estimated that well under 0.1 percent of Big Walk's code had anything to do with LLM use. That is less than one part in a thousand. The studio said generative AI was not used in any other context during the making of the game.
The studio also said it had not disclosed any generative AI use for Big Walk before it submitted the game to the IGF. The disclosure came after that submission.
The IGF has its own position on the matter. Nineteen IGF jurors issued a statement saying they would not vote for any game that used generative AI during its development. The statement sets out how those judges will approach entries, and it applies to the festival's voting.
House House is best known for Untitled Goose Game, a puzzle game in which players control a mischievous goose. It is available on Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One and PC. The studio's first game, Push Me Pull You, is available on PS4 and PC. Big Walk, its third game, is available on Nintendo Switch 2, PS5 and PC.
House House says the tools touched a very small share of the code and were used for research and debugging. The studio has not said how the disclosure will affect the game's standing with the festival.
