Crap. I worked on this bit-shifting one for awhile and all I came up with for an answer was 11. I thought the 11 was binary so I bit-shifted to 10 (dropping the leading 1 since I was looking for 2 characters in the game code so I thought we were only working with 2 bits) and then 10++ is 11. Then I thought, "maybe the 11 is decimal", so 11 is 1011 in binary, bit shifted to 10110, and then incremented to 10111. And, again, I only needed 2 chars in the code so I just took the rightmost 2 bits = 11. It never occurred to me to keep everything and then maybe in the end you'd end up with a 2-digit decimal number.

Oh well. Thanks for the explanation. And thanks for the giveaway, Ipopman.

In "dearth" but not in "earth" - the letter D
There's a character in Star Trek: Voyager named "Seven of Nine"
2D games before 3D games (duh)
A baker's dozen is 13, (13-1)/2 = 6
The author of the Harry Potter series (well, her pen name, at least) is Joanne Kathleen Rowling, so "JK".
"X marks the spot" is an adventure fiction cliche (the location of the treasure on treasure maps), also a colloquial phrase.
Gully dwarves are a fictional race in the Dragonlance setting. They use the numerals "one" and "two" (I'd dispute that, though - if your word for "more than two" is the same as for "two", you can actually count to one - but that's what the books say); once you googled the setting, it's googleable via "gully dwarf dragonlance".

Thank you!

I redeemed Fallout from the code. Hope nobody minds? I messed up on the bitshift question, so when I tried to brute force the "eye" question, it gave me invalid code every time. Oh well.

Thanks for the puzzle lpopman. I enjoy these kinds of giveaways, even though I'm not very good at them.

For me, that is exactly what I thought. But I interpreted the meaning of "immediately below" to be preceding, and H is immediately before I.

I went directly to C++ where << is bitshift left and ++ is adding one. I guess these operators are used in various languages.