Big Walk's developer admits a 10-line AI-assisted bug fix, and indie award judges split over it

The indie games world is arguing over how much AI is too much, and the answer from some judges is "any," Kyle Orland reports for Ars Technica.

The jurors' line

On Monday, 19 members of the 50-plus jury for the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards published a signed statement refusing to vote for games that use generative AI at all, in any form. They pointed to more AI-assisted entries and to harms they see in AI, from labor and economics to the environment and mental health, and asked the IGF to bar games containing any AI-generated work in future years. The statement named no games.

The game in the middle

By Tuesday, attention had landed on Big Walk, a well-loved co-op puzzle game by House House. The studio disclosed that, late in development, it turned to LLMs a handful of times for tough technical problems and bugs, which it says amounts to well under 0.1% of the code.

The main case was a Unity engine bug that produced shadows of "infinite length" and slowed the game down. A Unity engineer told the team a fix wasn't possible, so the studio asked a chatbot, then reworked its suggestion heavily into the 10 lines that shipped. At least one person on social media says the bug could have been fixed by hand with enough effort.

House House says it didn't disclose this on Steam because Valve's AI form covers AI-generated content, not coding help. It did tell the IGF, whose rules make no such distinction, and published the note once the issue became public. The studio said its disclosure isn't an argument for AI tools and apologized that its use may not meet some people's standards.

The fallout

Jurors Austin Walker and Damon Reece, both effusive about the game, said even this small use outweighed their admiration. Reece wrote that the pain is necessary to steer the culture away from AI. Steam got more than 400 negative reviews in a few days, though the game's overall rating stayed "Very Positive."

Others think it's out of proportion. IGF judge Liz Ryerson said it didn't disqualify the game for her and objected to treating every level of AI use as the same. The separate Indie Game Awards went further last year, pulling awards from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 over AI-made placeholder textures.

Scoreboard update: Humans +1. Indie judges vote to keep even a 10-line AI fix out of the awards.

Stay undead.