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Big Walk developer House House disclosed limited AI use in a bug fix, prompting pushback from Independent Games Festival judges, Ars Technica reported on November 11, 2026. Some judges say any amount of AI coding is too much for judging indie games. The controversy began when 19 of the festival's more than 50 jury members signed a statement declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI and urging a strict anti-AI policy. House House said it used LLMs sparingly near the end of development to work around a Unity bug that caused slow-running infinite-length shadows, and that the AI-suggested fix, which an engineer had said was not possible, was modified extensively into about 10 lines of code, well under 0.1% of the game's code. The studio did not disclose this for the Steam release because Valve does not request disclosure of code or chatbot usage, but it did mention it in its IGF submission and later made it public. Judges Austin Walker and Damon Reece had praised Big Walk in blog posts, but both said even minimal AI use outweighed that for awards consideration. The game's Steam page received over 400 negative reviews, though its overall "Very Positive" rating has held up, according to Ars Technica. Others, including judge Liz Ryerson, said the use was not disqualifying and that the degree of AI use matters. Ars Technica also noted that the separate Indie Game Awards rescinded awards for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last year after AI-made textures were found.