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Hi y'all

I'm ItsHighNoon. I am a systems programmer, both professionally and unprofessionally. I love making all kinds of low level software, including game engines. This is a portfolio of the games I've made over the years.

You can find sources at GitHub and binaries at itch.io.

Die Trying (August 2025)

Die Trying is a game created for the (second?) 2025 Brackey's game jam. The theme was "risk it for the biscuit". This game was supposed to be a bit of a roguelike deckbuilder where you accumulated various dice and used them in Risk-esque combat. However, doing a third jam this year (and so soon after GMTK) really took it out of me, and we weren't able to complete the original scope. Even so, I am pretty happy with the final product. Once again, another developer was involved, and with them came the use of GameMaker. I actually quite like GameMaker. It is a lot more capable that I expected it to be. But you know what drives me crazy? The fact that the HTML5 export isn't responsive! So you'll have to pardon the scroll bars. It plays nicer on the itch page. Also GameMaker doesn't play nice with version control. So, do I like Die Trying more than Ander's Loophole? No. But it certainly succeeds in some places where Ander's Loophole failed.

Ander's Loophole (August 2025)

Ander's Loophole is a game created for the 2025 GMTK game jam, where the theme was "loop". In this game, you are drawing loops around houses to create gerrymandered electoral districts. The game is about creating districts that secure a victory for your faction (which is always the minority) while also abiding by a changing set of rules. I worked with a team for this jam. The other developer was most comfortable in Python, so the game uses pygame. Pygame is interesting. I hated every second of using Python yet things came together quickly. But that probably has a lot more to do with the fact that I wasn't writing OpenGL calls than that Python is easier to work with. The jam was super tight (4 days) and I'm realizing that not using a proper engine is shooting myself in the foot. Maybe next time...

Who Holds The Power? (February 2025)

Who Holds The Power? is a game I created for the 2025 Bigmode game jam, where the theme was "power". In universe, a corporation has more power over what goes on than the actual ruler, known as the director. The gameplay is similar to Reigns, with the additional twist that you are not allowed to disobey the powerful corporation too many times. I always prefer to roll my own engine, but this jam caught me off guard and I didn't have anything prepared. I also never got comfortable with any of the commercial game engines out there. Learning one was going to take too long, so I opted to make the game in plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript. No canvas.

Also, I got to watch videogamedunkey play this on stream, which was truly an honor :)

Breakout (November 2022)

This was my final project for my computer graphics course, where the assignment was to make the classic game breakout with 3D graphics. The gameplay isn't anything special, but since the project was going to be presented I wanted to include some unique effects. I added water using a simplified version of the technique described here, which I have used before. Also, I have included screen door transparency, which was new to me. I like the effect and always assumed people did it for style (they do not, it is an optimization trick). The game is written in Javascript and uses WebGL.

MirrorGame (October 2021)

This is a game I created for a game jam about mirrors. I took this as an opportunity to build a 2D raytracer, which is mathematically simpler than a 3D raytracer but presents unique challenges since 2D objects aren't defined by geometry. The game is a simple top down shooter where you have to get to the end and can optionally kill enemies. Walls in the level block your visibility, unless they are mirrors, in which case the world will appear to be reflected behind the mirror. The game is written in Java using OpenGL via LWJGL.

Airwaves (September 2020)

Airwaves was also created for a game jam where the theme was "airborne". I started the jam off with the idea of generating all of my textures at startup with math functions, as well as filling audio buffers with various waveforms. Eventually, I created the sine wave texture, which gave me the idea for the game where you play as a radio wave. It didn't turn out to be a very fun concept, but it was the first time I ever participated in a game jam. The game uses C++ with OpenGL via GLFW/glad.

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Apparently, I have an allergy to using the same tech stack twice in a row. I'm working on a 3D game engine that I hope I will be able to use for all my projects eventually. That day is still far away, but every game here has contributed to that goal directly or indirectly.