Shiromofu Factory is the developer of an indie RPG game named Dungeon Antiqua. Despite its positive rating, the game has encountered some issues after its release. In a post on Note, the developer shared their story on how they had to deal with their game being blocked on Steam. This horrible event was caused by various antivirus software flagging their game as a virus. The developer said that this false positive was due to them using PyInstaller to generate the game executable file.
Dungeon Antiqua is a dungeon crawl-type RPG inspired by the Wizardry and old Final Fantasy series. Shiromofu Factory likes to use the retro-style game engine Pyxel, which utilizes Python as its programming language. This engine also uses Pyinstaller to make the executable file. The developer believed that antivirus software tended to mark files generated by PyInstaller as Trojans.
Initially, Shiromofu Factory decided to revert the game’s version and asked players to exclude the game .exe file from their antivirus software. Unfortunately, this meant that the developer could not update Dungeon Antiqua. This wasn’t acceptable since they wanted to release a major update that expanded the game’s playable area.
To solve this issue, Shiromofu Factory attempted various solutions, such as building their own bootloader and requesting antivirus software to recheck their findings. The developer even decided to buy a code signing certificate that cost 180,000 yen or around $1,100 US. Unfortunately, the review process was too long so they ditched this method.
Ultimately, Shiromofu Factory decided to thoroughly check Dungeon Antiqua‘s code to determine the cause of the issue. The developer finally narrowed down the possible culprit and discovered that Python’s “os.remove()” function for deleting local save data files was likely the cause. They hoped that changing the os library with the pathlib library would fix the issue, but that wasn’t the case.
Apparently, antivirus software remembers the URL and file name of the program or files they previously marked as viruses. Although Shiromofu Factory edited Dungeon Antiqua‘s content, the game was still blocked. The developer tried to change the executable name to “dungeon-antiqua-v2.exe,” but that still didn’t work. Thankfully, they finally got a good result by flipping the game’s icon horizontally.
