Guardians of Dale

Guardians of Dale was a small text adventure that came out of a game-design lesson plan, built, as the tutorial put it, in "the most powerful game engine in the world, Windows Notepad." It ran as a Windows batch file in the command prompt, with ASCII art, a welcome from the town's mayor, and simple systems for attacking, taking damage, earning gold and buying weapons that change your stats.

It was never meant to be a complete game, but a teaching project with open source code to edit. The full source was published on mikethetech.com in May 2019 along with a section-by-section code breakdown, and the download was later offered on itch.io as name-your-own-price.