From The Verge · Jay Peters · · 1m 30s
Indie games split over AI as Big Walk sparks fury
Independent Games Festival jurors vow to reject AI-made games. Big Walk's developers admit using AI for code, sparking backlash in the indie community.
In brief
Independent Games Festival jurors vow to reject AI-made games. Big Walk's developers admit using AI for code, sparking backlash in the indie community. IGF jurors pledged to reject games using generative AI, then Big Walk's developers disclosed minimal AI use for debugging, dividing the indie game community…
IGF jurors draw a line on AI
Some Independent Games Festival jurors published a statement saying they will not vote for games using generative AI in any capacity, citing negative effects.
Big Walk admits to AI use
Big Walk's developer House House disclosed it used AI sparingly in the final stretch of development to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs.
“sparingly”
How much AI was actually used
House House said well under 0.1% of Big Walk's code involved copying snippets from LLM responses as a starting point to be modified into game code.
“well under 0.1%”
The specific AI use case
House House's primary use of LLMs was researching issues with third-party code via chatbots, including fixing a shadow problem after consulting a Unity engineer.
Who signed the anti-AI statement
IGF jurors who signed include Telling Lies and Immortality creator Sam Barlow and Celeste composer Lena Raine, though some feared professional blowback.
House House's path forward
House House disclosed AI usage in its IGF submission but not on Steam, saying it had no AI policy when developing Big Walk, which it called a failure.
The big picture
IGF jurors pledged to reject games using generative AI, then Big Walk's developers disclosed minimal AI use for debugging, dividing the indie game community.
