#If anyone knows if there's some kind of GameMaker-specific setting to get around this plz feel free to reply!

[devsgames]

Do you know what's up with the Windows Defender warnings that sometimes pop up on game maker projects and/or exe's? I have had this thing happen where I wanted to show friends my wip-stuff, and their Windows would go through the whole routine of "we have blocked functions, do you want to run this anyway?" The idea that I would upload something to itch.io only for random people worrying that I might be trying to infect their devices with malware puts a damper on wanting to make stuff to share in the first place

This was something that actually came up a few weeks ago in my Discord (I believe @vissadev had to deal with it on one of their projects). I honestly have little experience with it myself - Windows is either cool with my Unity executables or executing them mostly via Steam like most of my users do must certify it better. I imagine embedded web builds would probably not trigger this behaviour, if that's an option.

To get around this apparently you can also submit your applications to Microsoft for scan/review, wherein they look at it and go "oh it's just a game" and then update their registry to stop that from happening. Other antiviruses usually have an option to do that as well. It's probably best saving this process for shipping and just dealing with the warnings while you're still in development or adding exceptions to your antivirus, it might be annoying but submitting builds as you go could be even more annoying. It's not a great system but it's probably better than nothing!

I will say though that you shouldn't let that deter you from sharing your work! Like, it's going to be pretty inevitable that antivirus will false-positive your builds at some point or another, and I think most users when downloading a game are pretty good at recognizing the difference between secret virus or just a dang video game. It's just part of the process and doesn't really reflect poorly on you - it's not like you're actually sending people malware! If it's done through itch it's at least a little more legitimate as opposed to those Discord attacks where people DM randos with a 1kb file saying "please play my game".

Heck, I think especially on itchio where people download hasty little game jam titles labelled "My First Game_v12__FINAL_2.0_026" on a regular basis I think you're probably fine if it's not a shipped game. :)

(Also I just Googled it, apparently this is frequently reported in GameMaker and they have some recommendations to address it as well!)