Capstone Projects

A menu-driven collection: guess the number, hi-lo card game, multiplication quiz, and dice poker, with a high-score file.

Project 1 — Number games collection (beginner)

A menu-driven collection: guess the number, hi-lo card game, multiplication quiz, and dice poker, with a high-score file. *Concepts: variables, I/O, control flow, RND, SELECT CASE, sequential files.*

Project 2 — Personal finance tracker (beginner/intermediate)

Record income and expenses by category and date, show monthly summaries with PRINT USING, bar charts in text or graphics, and CSV import/export. *Concepts: TYPEs, arrays, string parsing, file I/O, formatting, sorting.*

Project 3 — Text adventure engine (intermediate)

Data-driven rooms, items, and verbs loaded from files; a two-word parser; inventory; save/load; scripting of simple puzzles. *Concepts: string processing, data structures, files, structured design.*

Project 4 — Arcade game (intermediate)

A complete Breakout, Asteroids, or Space Invaders clone with sprites, sound effects, music, levels, particle explosions, title and game-over states, and a high-score table. *Concepts: graphics, _PUTIMAGE, sound, _KEYDOWN, game loop, state machine, collision detection.*

Project 5 — Paint and image-processing studio (intermediate/advanced)

Mouse-driven drawing tools (pencil, line, rectangle, flood fill, color picker), undo stack, image load/save, and filters (grayscale, blur, edge detection) using _MEMIMAGE. *Concepts: mouse input, images, _MEM, stacks, algorithms, file formats.*

Project 6 — Tile-based RPG (advanced)

Scrolling tile map from a level file, animated player and NPCs, dialogue boxes, inventory, turn-based battles, and a level editor tool. *Concepts: 2-D arrays, sprite sheets, file formats, modular .bi/.bm libraries, state machines.*

Project 7 — Cross-dialect library management system (advanced)

The same application (books, members, loans, overdue reports) built in QB64-PE with RANDOM files, then ported to FreeBASIC with OOP types and to VB.NET with classes, LINQ, and Windows Forms. *Concepts: random-access files, OOP, porting, LINQ, GUI events.*

Project 8 — Office automation suite (advanced)

VBA tools for Excel: a UserForm data-entry front end, data validation, automatic pivot-style summaries, chart generation, and a macro that emails reports via Outlook — plus a VB.NET console tool that processes the exported CSV files. *Concepts: VBA object model, UserForms, events, error handling, VB.NET file processing.*