Big Walk AI code: Untitled Goose Game dev says under 0.1% involved AI

House House, the studio behind Untitled Goose Game, has confirmed that LLM chatbots helped fix bugs in Big Walk, estimating that well under 0.1 percent of the game’s code was involved. The disclosure follows a statement from 19 Independent Games Festival jurors who are declining to vote for any game made with generative AI.

House House, the Melbourne studio behind Untitled Goose Game, has confirmed that large language models (LLMs) were used in the final stretch of development on Big Walk. Panic published the cooperative adventure on August 4, 2026, for Windows, Mac, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2. The studio added an AI section to the game’s FAQ on November 10, a day after 19 jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival (IGF) said they would decline to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity.

The statement, shared on Bluesky by Austin Walker and signed by Her Story creator Sam Barlow, among others, did not name a game. Developer Bruno Dias later wrote on Bluesky that IGF judges were made aware of LLM use in Big Walk through the festival’s submission disclosure. The signatories do not speak for the IGF.

What House House says the LLM was used for

According to the FAQ, the studio mainly used chatbots to research problems with third-party code. In some cases, snippets from LLM responses were copied as a starting point and modified into game code. House House estimates that well under 0.1 percent of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage and says generative AI was not used in any other context.

The studio gives one example. Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP) only culls shadow casters by distance in the camera’s forward direction, so objects behind the player were rendered at an infinite distance. That made the game run 50 percent slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. House House could not find a fix, and an engineer at Unity concluded it was not possible. A chatbot suggested an approach that, after extensive modification, became about 10 lines of code inside URP.

Why there is no AI label on Steam

House House says it wrote the disclosure as a suggested part of its IGF submission and made none on Steam because the platform does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage. Valve updated its Steam disclosure form in January 2026 to state that efficiency gains from AI-powered development tools are not its focus.

House House says it supports “the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world” and apologizes that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards. The studio calls shipping without an internal AI usage policy “a failure” and says it will work toward a more comprehensive one.