Hey folks!

Today I'm releasing a cool little lib for adding analytics to your PICO-8 game.

You might ask, "wat?" So lemme demonstrate with a quick video:

Essentially, it's a way to track what your players are doing, and to analyze that data afterward for insights. Are players discovering the secret power-up in my game? Are they dying too much, and quitting out of frustration? You can track all of that! And use that information to make your game's design better.

This library sends data to Segment, where I work as a full-time engineer. (I do PICO-8 development as a hobby.) Segment is a badass analytics product that forwards your data to hundreds of tools. For starters, you can turn on Google Analytics in Segment, but there are many other tools in the catalog you can check out.

To use it, head on over to the GitHub repo for instructions (https://github.com/segmentio/analytics-pico8). Using it looks something like this:

Note that this lib will only work with PICO-8's HTML5 export.

Please try it out if you'd like, and lemme know what you think!

Oh, someone else trying to apply app development practices to PICO-8! Fortunately you only need the serializing code on PICO-8 side, so that shouldn't add too much to your web cartridge size.

I don't need analytics for my game right now, but I'll have a look at Segment anyway. Thanks!