sooo i downloaded this, excited to play,  but windows gave me the "windows protected your PC" window, so i put it through VirusTotal and it said its a trojan malware :(

I do think that's just how many downloads and itchio games go. I ignore windows warning because it will flag basically everything/anything. itch files I believe are pretty safe, if this only happens with my game then I'm not really sure. Though again this is just a pretty common thing that systems will flag something because it's always safer to not have anything downloaded even if the % of that is really really low. I've downloaded a ton of things since I was young and never had a virus or anything! That's your choice to make however.