Intercambio small update

TL;DR: No need to update it you are happy with the current version. The binaries for Intercambio v15 were triggering an antivirus alert due to GameMaker. Rebuilt everything with GameMaker 2.3 to remove the alert. No other changes to the game.

Long story

A person contacted me this afternoon telling me that their computer was showing the message “intercambio.exe was blocked because it could hard your device”. I was surprised because the binaries were uploaded more than 2 years ago and no one has complained since then.

Upon investigation it was just the browser preventing the download of a “.exe” file. I shouldn’t have put the file directly for download. I should have packed it in a “.zip” file to prevent the browser from blocking the download.

In order to be extra sure that there was no virus in the game I uploaded the files to VirusTotal. VirusTotal is a service (previously owned by Google, now part of Alphabet) where you can draw a file into the page and it will check against most of the antivirus applications in the market.

To my distress, VirusTotal found 3 antivirus than flagged Intercambio:

A quick search gave me some posts like this Steam thread where people were commenting about false positives in binaries created by GameMaker Studio. All the posts were from a couple years ago and Intercambio was built in 2018 with GameMaker Studio 1.4. More recent binaries created with GameMaker Studio 2 didn’t have any flag in VirusTotal.

I was sure there was no issue with the binaries but I didn’t any false positive so I took down all v16 and launched GameMaker 2 to update the game. Luckily it ran second try (I had a string without closing quotes that GMS1 didn’t complain about).

There are no other changes to the game. Just the updates on the engine that GM did between 1.4 and 2.3.

You don’t need to update if you are comfortable with the old binaries. Keep in mind that at some point an antivirus could flag them by mistake.

I plan to polish the game and add more content now it runs in GameMaker Studio 2.3 so stay tuned. Thanks.