Hey guys.

I sent an exe file to my sister yesterday of a game that I'm making so she could give me some feedback.

Aside from the assets problem (I haven't done anything with it yet), the most pressing concern for me is that windows defender didn't like the executable and made quite the scene treating it as a dangerous program.

Since it was my sister it wasn't such a big deal but I can see how this can be embarrassing.

So I wonder how do you guys deal with that? What can we do so that windows knows our game is safe to run?

How do you guys send prototypes for artists and other folks who might collaborate but aren't programmers (can't compile on their own)?

Thanks!

The best you can do is to buy signing certificate and sign executables with your name or your company name.
At least then when warning will show up, it will display your name. And after a while it will go away - as MS collects telemetry how often people run signed executables, and it is often enough, the warning is not displayed.

Ah... too bad then. Those are expensive! I guess i'll be looking at it down the line.

Thanks.

Hello there,

I'm sorry if I'm asking a stupid question, I've never dealt with executable certificates myself: what about hosting your executable on a "trusted" website, like Itch.io? There are many games there that have been downloaded only a handful of times, many of which are free so I suppose their author didn't buy certificates, and yet I've never seen anything trigger Windows defender.

That is a good question. I'm wondering if a unity game's exe is signed by unity? If that is the case maybe some of those games are made in unity. I just remember messing around with unity in the past and I remember even uploading a pong clone on itch.io and sharing with some friends. I can't remember now if windows defender liked it or not.

Executables produced by Unity are not signed. I doubt they want or even are allowed to do that, as that would make life of some hacker easier - they could write code in Unity, and distribute their "evil" software with signed executable.

In my previous job we bought certificate to sign application we were creating in Unity.

As for itch.io - I just now downloaded some random Unity game from itch, and got security warning about unknown publisher. Guntha, either you have turned off this setting on your Windows, or you are not using windows explorer to unzip. For example, if you use 7-Zip, this warning won't appear, as 7-Zip does not set property on executable indicating it was from .zip file that was downloaded from web. Default Windows Explorer unzipper sets it.

It's possible 7-zip helps in my case, I've pretty much never used Windows Explorer's zip capabilities on a Windows 10 machine; though I remember having Windows's security warning triggered by an executable of my own that I had downloaded from my own website to test a link. I was just wondering if Microsoft had a list of "trusted" sources, instead of whitelisting executables one by one.