Big Walk devs disclosed using a chatbot to fix a bug; now over half of Steam reviews are negative
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"Big Walk getting cancelled over limited LLM use in coding (which they disclosed) genuinely makes me anti AI-disclosure." That post drew about 2,500 likes on Nov. 10, as House House, the studio behind Untitled Goose Game, faced a review-bombing over its new game Big Walk.
The game's FAQ says that in the final stretch of development the studio used chatbots to research hard technical problems and bugs, sometimes using snippets as a starting point for game code. It estimates well under 0.1% of the code had anything to do with this, and says generative AI was not used anywhere else. Its example: Unity's shadow culling made the game run 50% slower for about 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. The disclosure was first written for its IGF submission.
Aftermath reported that some IGF jurors said they would not vote for games that used generative AI in development. Developer Kenton Varda noted that about 55% of Steam reviews were negative as of Nov. 10. A post pushing back, saying the AI "was used to alter 10 lines of code to fix a bug a human engineer said would be impossible," drew about 6,000 likes.
House House said the disclosure "is not an endorsement of, or argument for, the use of AI tools," and called building the game without an internal AI policy "a failure" it will fix. Steam does not ask developers to disclose code or chatbot use.
“TLDR on the Big Walk article. Some awards judges say they won’t vote for games that used gen AI during development. House House used a chatbot to help fix bugs.”
