A Japanese indie developer recently recounted the stressful experience of having their game repeatedly flagged as a virus, and gave some helpful infor

“I went through hell” Japanese indie dev on how their game was wrongly flagged as a virus, and blocked on Steam

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2024-12-28 01:30:07

A Japanese indie developer recently recounted the stressful experience of having their game repeatedly flagged as a virus, and gave some helpful information for others who might find themselves in this situation. Their story highlights the power of antivirus software, and how it can prevent developers from distributing games that they poured their heart and soul into. 

Shiromofu Factory released their game Dungeon Antiqua back on October 10, 2024. Inspired by the retro charm of early Final Fantasy and Wizardry games, it is a nostalgic dungeon crawler in which you level up your characters by fighting monsters. Playable on both Windows and macOS, it currently has a Very Positive review status on Steam. 

Post-launch, Shiromofu Factory set about making updates, bug fixes and adding requested features to Dungeon Antiqua. At first it was smooth sailing, but then the December 6 version of the game was released, and users reported that it was triggering virus warnings from antivirus software like Norton, Avast and McAfee. “I went through hell from here on,” recounts the developer in post on note.com, under their username frenchbread. 

The dev set about working out what the problem was. Dungeon Antiqua was made using the retro-style game engine Pyxel. This engine uses Python as its programming language and uses Pyinstaller to generate executable files. The developer assumed this was the source of the issue. It seems that virus checkers have a tendency to perceive files generated by Pyinstaller as Trojan viruses, as they behave in a similar way.  

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