House House confirmed that "Treading Deeply" made limited use of large language models near the end of development to investigate technical issues and bugs, with the relevant code accounting for less than 0.1% of the total game code. As submissions for the Independent Games Festival awards closed, the use of generative AI became a focal point of discussion among judges, with some jurors deciding not to vote for any works that utilized generative AI during development.
House House subsequently updated the FAQ on the "Treading Deeply" official website. The team stated that some AI-generated code snippets were used only as a starting point for solving problems and were then significantly modified by developers. Generative AI was not used in other development stages.
The team cited a shadow rendering issue in Unity's Universal Render Pipeline as an example: the problem caused the game to slow down by 50% for about 20 seconds during sunrise and sunset. After conducting their own research and consulting with Unity engineers without finding a solution, a chatbot later provided an approach that, after extensive modifications, proved effective. The final fix involved approximately 10 lines of code within the pipeline.
House House stated that this disclosure was initially drafted in accordance with the Independent Games Festival's submission guidelines, and revealing this information does not constitute an endorsement of AI tools. The studio also acknowledged that failing to establish an internal AI usage policy during development was a mistake and expressed its intention to implement a more comprehensive policy in the future. The current focus of controversy is whether strict judging criteria will affect "Treading Deeply"'s eligibility for awards.