About Me

Bio

Hey! I'm MarkAlarm, though you can call me Mark for short. I'm a 21 year old male (he/him) from the United States, and I love to make and play games! Most of my time spent with games involves livestreaming, speedrunning, creating and playing ROM hacks, and programming custom assets. Outside of my online presence, I am a full-time student at college studying Computer Science, so most of my time is spent either studying or with school involvements. I also enjoy cooking, swimming, and working out.

Speedrunning

I first started speedrunning around late 2016/early 2017, where I played New Super Mario Bros. U Low% and got my first world record after a few months of playing. I would later find interest in more obscure games such as We Ski and Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, both of which I obtained world records in. I still come back to these games every so often in order to improve old times. I have also done runs of well known games such as Minecraft and Celeste, though not at a top level.

Another aspect of speedrunning I've gotten into regards marathons and my contributions to them. I've played in, done commentary for, and have work showcased in several. Those include Games Done Quick, No Glitches Allowed, Game Over Cancer, and Big Bad Gameathon. I plan on continuing to learn new games, improve old ones, and maybe take some new world records if I find enough interest in a given game or category. I've included some of the runs I'm most proud of below, though if you check speedrun.com you can see a more complete list of runs I've bothered submitting.

ROM Hacking

After playing Super Mario Maker (SMM) back in late 2015/early 2016 and learning about the concept of "kaizo", I later learned about Super Mario World ROM Hacking (SMW). I first saw this as a nice PC alternative to SMM and started working with it on New Years Day 2017, but I quickly fell in love with it and continued to work with SMW more and more. While I rarely played SMW hacks, I would make levels and full games quite frequently. By New Years Day 2019, I began learning how to program custom assets for SMW where I first attempted to emulate assets from Celeste inside of SMW. Fast forward three years later, and I developed and entire hack that blends SMW and Celeste into a full kaizo experience, titled "Celeste.smc".

Nowadays, I feel burned out of SMW hacking due to my nonstop, constant, and self-deprecating development process. I may still make a level from time to time, contribute to a collaboration, or code assets for other people, but I have little to no desire to create a full length hack of my own anymore. As for my future in ROM Hacking, I plan on contributing my SNES programming knowledge to other games in order to boost the documentation and accessibility of said games. My current endeavors are with Mega Man X and homebrew, though I may decide to pick up other games (or even other consoles!) in the future.

Programming

Most of my early programming expertise came from developing ASM modifications and assets for SMW. I have mostly moved on to SNES homebrew development in terms of passion projects, though I am also looking into the Mega Man X code. I have done commissions for individuals in the SMW community, which is where my freelance programming experience comes from. This involved a consistent back and forth with the individual to figure out what exactly they wanted, how they wanted it to be implemented, and how to toe the line between implementing their vision on hardware from the early 90s while also keeping said hardware's constraints in mind. Feel free to check out some of my work under its respective tab!