Hi there.

I would like to make a suggestion to @zep: I would love if there was a public or private (developer key based for instance) API allowing to list all the carts with their associated meta data: stars, submit date, last thread update, tags, etc. to allow 3rd party pages to propose alternative ways to discover them.

I would love to be able to surface easily the latest new "hot" games when I come back to PICO8 every six months or to order them by popularity, just to find some gems I've never encountered yet.

I used to look at the picotracker website a user made long time ago, but it is now dead (and it had very limited features).

It could be achieved by scrapping the website but it's not respectful, not elegant and a pain to develop.

To avoid abuses, the API could do something like caching the result of the query once per day and return that?

I hope this feature request will get some attention :) ♥.

I second this proposal. I get the desire to have people come to the BBS and get that traffic/engagement/etc - but at this point there are SO MANY carts that it's just become a real discovery problem. I mean, 10 years of cart submissions and many, many greats get overlooked because they're on Page 32 of the "New" or "Featured" list in Splore.

I almost always play games on my handheld so I use the BBS and web at large to find titles and then go back to Splore and just search. So having more resources that can pick/curate/hype carts would be a boon for everyone.

Hi @dTb, @morningtoast

I agree that there is a need for more exploration options, but I'd rather spend that effort improving the BBS first! I fear that adding an API like this would have an unpredictable long tail of support, and taken by scrapers as a tacit invitation (even if behind an api key).

To answer the question about how to check for top carts in the last 6 months, you can do that in the search box with: t:halfyear. The number of days can also be given t:20 or other named durations t:week,t:month and inclusive time ranges with the "tr:" prefix: tr:2022, tr:202210-202305

These options are currently not in the main interface because in the past I've found sorting by stars feeds back too much (more stars -> more visibility -> more stars), and so opted for the featured list ordered by time-of-feature to get a nicer distribution over time. But later there will be an Advanced Search pulldown for options like that.

On a related note, here are the top PICO-8 carts by year of release:

2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

I've also recently added a New & Popular mode, which is less noisy than New but aims to give hidden gems a better chance of gaining long term visibility via the Lucky Draw / Featured.

Awesome, perfect. Thank you very much @zep!