Independent Games Festival jurors recently said they would not vote for games made with generative AI “in any capacity,” citing concerns about its harms and a rise in AI-assisted entries. They stressed that the statement did not represent the festival as a whole or every juror; some were concerned about professional blowback for signing it.¹

The statement sharpened attention on Big Walk, a cooperative adventure game by House House, the studio behind Untitled Goose Game. The developers said they had used AI “sparingly” in the final stretch of development, mainly to investigate problems with third-party code. In one case, after extensive research and consulting a Unity engineer, they used chatbot-suggested code as a starting point to fix a shadow issue. House House estimated that well under 0.1 percent of the game’s code was connected to this use, and said generative AI played no other role in making the game.¹

House House said it disclosed the use in its IGF submission, but not on Steam, which does not ask developers to report code or chatbot use. The studio called its lack of an AI policy during development a “failure” and said it would create a more comprehensive policy. It also cautioned that disclosure could help normalize the technology, adding that its statement was “not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools.”¹

Barlow, a juror and creator of Telling Lies and Immortality, said Big Walk did not trigger the IGF discussion, but became a “tricky edge case.” He said the point was not to boycott or economically hurt a team; it was to ask what an award should mean as an indie alternative to mainstream development. The clash is less about the size of one code contribution than about whether any AI use changes a game’s claim to that label.¹