A Python script to scrape itch.io for names of games in the Pico-8 categories.

PLEASE NOTE: This script does not download games; it only collects meta information.

My goal is to make a comprehensive list of (Finished/retail/published) Pico-8 games. Itch.io is a great source of developers publishing games (free/paid) for the Pico-8 platform.

Before running the script, make sure to install the required packages by running the following commands:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Then, execute the script using Python:

python itchscrape.py

This script will scrape from the itch.io Pico-8 page and compile a CSV file with the following fields: Game_Name, Game_Price, Game_Genre, and Game_URL.

Example Games_data.csv:

1. SUPER CRANE, $5, Puzzle, https://calixjumio.itch.io/super-crane
2. PICOHOT, N/A, Shooter, https://tarkovsky.itch.io/picohot
3. UFO Swamp Odyssey, N/A, Platformer, https://paranoidcactus.itch.io/ufo
4. Villager, N/A, Strategy, https://partnano.itch.io/villager
5. CELESTE Classic, N/A, Platformer, https://mattmakesgames.itch.io/celesteclassic
6. Pico World Race, N/A, Racing, https://pak-9.itch.io/pico-world-race

This is a work in progress, and I hope to add more fields to it in the future to create an organized collection for Pico-8.

One of the challenges I came across was the itch.io page loading dynamically when scrolling. To overcome this, the script uses the requests library to fetch the content and BeautifulSoup to parse it. The script loops through all the pages by incrementing page_num until there are no more games to scrape.

Feel free to use and contribute to this project!