# Guardians of Dale

> A Notepad-made text adventure from a game-design lesson plan.

Canonical page: https://pyrosoft.pro/software/guardians-of-dale

Status: deprecated
Platforms: Windows

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.

Legacy reference only. This product is no longer distributed. No purchase or outbound links are provided.

## Recorded details

- First release: May 20, 2019, on mikethetech.com
- Tech: Windows batch script, written in Notepad

## Screenshots

![Command-prompt title screen with an ASCII-art dragon and the Guardians of Dale banner](https://pyrosoft.pro/store-assets/media/guardians-of-dale/guardians-of-dale-r1.png)
![Text combat screen against an ASCII-art Small Rat](https://pyrosoft.pro/store-assets/media/guardians-of-dale/guardians-of-dale-r2.png)
![Text screen for repairing Potter's Potions with gold, lumber and limestone](https://pyrosoft.pro/store-assets/media/guardians-of-dale/guardians-of-dale-r3.png)