Developers House House told Aftermath via email that “LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs”, and that they “estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage”.
Meh, if that were enough to exclude a game from GotY awards, you’d end up with a very short list of mostly unknown games, half of which probably did use LLMs for those sorts of tasks and are just lying about it.
And honestly, if AI-debugging can replace having to spend days of horrible crunchtime fixing those bugs, I’m all for it! That’s what AI should do, making people’s lives easier and not replacing their creativity.
“Difficult technical challenges and bugs” is what I find AI is the worst at in my experience.
“Everyone who says they hate AI is actually using it and embarrassed” is THE biggest cope I’ve ever read.
it’s disappointing but i get it. these tools are meant to be alluring and addictive. i’d be lying if i said i didn’t give in to the temptation a few times, as much as i hate to admit it.
i still think it should be disqualifying for a game awards ceremony. if not, i worry that this could be used as a foot in the door by slopbros to further normalize ai use in games (and, in turn, elsewhere)
The primary use case for House House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code. If you’re technically-minded, and curious, here’s an example. We needed to cull shadow casters by distance from the camera, but Unity URP only allows culling shadow casters by distance in camera forwards, so shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at an infinite distance. This made our game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We researched the problem extensively, and we looked at the URP code ourselves, but we couldn’t find a way. Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasn’t possible. Finally, we posed the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked. This fix represented about 10 lines of code inside URP.
“Temptation” is one way to put it, I suppose, when the human experts tell you it’s impossible. This award’s criteria was already decided, and they’re entitled to their definition, but this is just information that was surfaced to them rather than work done for them.
hooray, insane witch hunts and even more insane mental gymnastics galore!
(Big Walk is awesome and you should play it)
this sounds like they used it as a search engine rather than as an assistant. it’s one of those weird gray areas that come up with how integrated it is now. like, if you try to find something with a search engine and you get the “ai result” thing, is that “ai use”? the tokens were used anyway, and you read it even if you then click a link.
i hope the otherwise great reception of big walk can help a bit with the debate here.
They used AI for this??? Its like the most basic game ever.
It’s really not. A multiplayer open-world game is inherently complex to develop, even with modern engines.
It is. If they were gonna use AI, they could have at least used it on the voice chat system, as it was fucking shit.
You can make an open-world, online game in a day in Godot or Unity by hand with no AI. It is not difficult anymore to make simple online games. You’re just saying things and hoping they’re true.
No, I’m saying things I know to be true, because developing 3D multiuser apps in game engines is a large part of my job (and has been since well before AI).
You can throw a couple GameObjects into a scene and synchronize them pretty quickly, but that does not a multiplayer game make. Every single script you write will be more complex when you need to keep multiplayer in mind and testing anything you’ve written becomes much more involved. This is especially true for a large Open World like Big Walk’s.
I have worked on an online Unity game, and it was not made in a day. It even came from a good template of a starting point, but everything you build on top of it is extra complexity that needs to be tested, debugged, and fixed.
Yeah, the tools in these engines are really good now and do all of the heavy lifting for you.
Perfect for ai then
All professional software development is using AI. This is normal and to be expected. Code AI contributions are rightfully handled differently in Steam’s AI disclosure.
Note how pretty much every major piece of software has gotten less reliable and less user friendly in the last few years. There might be a connection…
People have complained about this for as long as computers existed. It’s not a new development and not exclusive to LLM usage.
There is, but it’s not AI alone. It’s mostly the C-Suite trying to drown us in it.
