itch.io

I think you are right ZakaraGhorfati (ZG).

I've got to take into account you can't control which games will be the ones that let you down. So it's a struggle for both parties.

I do see that many of your YT videos view counts are quite low. Which doesn't make sense because you are one of the few people who transparently review itch.io games on the regular. The fact that people aren't giving the videos and thus those games a chance to be "heard", is disturbing. 

You sensed right that I was not in a mood to react with any overt politeness. I know how quickly the mob turns on developers and I couldn't afford to pretend as if I did something wrong on the subject of literal malware or not. The fact is I take a lot of pride in my work.  I didn't think you were alleging it was malware but the mob may not care if you were or not. That includes other developers too btw who might have their smart kneejerk responses. This thread, your YT, and yourself are valuable, even if much goes underappreciated because we can't pick who gets to be a hit.

I really want things to be as simple as possible for you so you can do your job. Maybe I should remember you aren't paid anything to try these game so it's hard to stay motivated. You review games it seems almost daily, if not every other day. 

I also take into account what's enjoyable for me as a developer. I can't be watering down my methods, even if there are counter-examples of people succeeding differently. You clearly have played games that ran correctly i'm guessing on first try. Some not so much.

I knew from our experience before there was an issue but I sincerely felt this time around there wouldn't be one. The game is so much more than the main menu which in all cases we've interacted doesn't even show the buttons! 

Let's address the screenshot. It's true the game does things to its own files. The failure of which can lead to the game not running properly. 

If your anti-virus is blocking the game from doing what it does in this regard of manipulating its own files, then it's not a surprise the main menu won't load. That might seem strange consequence but the FIRST thing the game does is read/writing to its own files. This more or less a pre-GUI task.

Sadly I cannot fix this order of operations meaningfully, because the game still needs to touch its files eventually.

What I think we've learned here ZG is I need to add a GUI error window that says what has gone wrong. Then you can know what to do.

I'm definitely pretty tired myself and immensely broken by gamedev. Skipping the sob story about game journos not responding and me begging people to even give my game a chance...   it's just not easy to fundamentally re-work anything anymore.  I've for a long time wanted a more reliable UI at the start that was disentangled from game errors, but there are so many other unrelated issues that are important for the good of the game. I figure if someone really cares they just add the AV exceptions and get on with playing the game.

If you've tried everything then I guess it just wasn't meant to be. Good luck.