So after doing some digging, this error is a pretty common false positive to encounter with Ren'Py games, or executables that go unrecognized for smaller virus scanners (as seen in a quick search in F95zone itself). Plus one of the uploaders mentioned that they thoroughly check all the uploads, and windows defender is a little too aggressive at times (From Bob69).I also got this warning:
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I didn't want that to be the end of my research, so I ran a MalwareBytes scan and a Windows defender scan on my computer to see if there were any files that were throwing alarms. I also asked a couple of my friends to see if they could replicate the issue on their ends as well, and none of them could replicate it (Using Windows defender). I then tried to isolate the issue by zipping my base (pre-Ren'Py build and zipped) Ren'Py game folder and uploaded that to Virus Total for scanning
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with a completely clean result. And then I ran the zipped build file (post-Ren'Py build and zipped) after Ren'Py's compilation process into Virus Total for scanning
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with only a small scanner finding a trojan (a different one from this one). It seems windows defender is also very aggressive in trying to predict what might be a virus, and often results in false positives. Going through some reddit threads, I noticed that usually this happens for the latest build for Ren'Py as it goes unrecognized for some smaller virus scanners. Here is the
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to that thread. Just to be safe, I ran Virus total on the base Ren'Py SDK (downloaded from the
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itself) itself
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, and it results in the same trojan that was found in the compiled virus scan. My belief is that the .exe creates is being flagged by Windows defender for people due to the aggressive/predictive (since it is ML based from the extension) nature of its scans. Hope that sets your mind at a bit more ease, and please let me know if you are running into this trojan with any other virus scanners; that way I can look into this a bit deeper to see what might be the issue.