After exporting my game from Unreal Engine, I compressed a folder containing the exported game files and uploaded it to Itch.io. Initially, when downloading from Itch.io, everything worked fine. After downloading, you had to extract the compressed folder to access the game.
However, later at night, when I tried testing it again, I encountered the following messages when extracting and attempting to run the game:
“Windows protected your PC”
“Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk.”
I would like to know what I should do to fix this issue.
It’s quite possible your antivirus has flagged it as a virus as it’s tried to connect to the internet and not been given approval. It’s common that Unreal builds will provide a popup asking for approval to connect to a network. This is down to the various networking aspects that are enabled by default.
You can disable these in the plugins menu - Anything with the following -Online, Network,TCP,UDP,server in there name or description can be disregarded. This would stop any pop up as such.
I would also re download the project files and see how it runs again.