A wintergreen cursor blinked against the black void of the Apple IIE’s monitor, casting a faint glow onto the face of a young Michael Wagner. In the years to follow, those pixels would arrange into homework and games—and would generate a love of computer programming in the boy staring at them.
Twenty-three years after getting his first computer from his parents, Wagner is on the teaching staff for the Computer Science department at Allan Hancock College. This 28-year-old Santa Maria native teaches everything from PC care and upgrade to Linux and Shell scripting. He even finds time to work on his dream project on the side: Voxel Software.
Wagner does most of his Voxel Software business by setting up websites for other businesses, but his goal is to be programming software, whether it be iPhone games or apps, web pages, or software commissioned by other entities.
“Web pages are a different animal than programming,” Wagner said.
A web page is about layout. It’s about aesthetically placing information meant just to sit there.
“It’s static,” he explained.
But Wagner is headed in the right direction. Voxel has recently released its second video game, and the release of Hypercrush: The 8-Bit Adventure closes out 10 months of work on what Wagner describes as his “largest, most complete, interesting game.”
The game was commissioned and is modeled after the Los Angeles-based band Hypercrush. The side-scrolling platformer tells the story of Donny, Preston, and Holly, who are trying to get to their show on time. It features elements of Super Mario Brothers and Megaman and is stylistically an homage to the old 8-bit arcade and Nintendo games, a genre of which Wagner is a fan.
“The challenges that we have are the competition in the iPhone game market,” he explained. “There are a wide variety of games, so it is important to differentiate your application.”
Hypercrush follows the release of Floating Space Rocks, a scrolling shooter that runs along the lines of many old arcade games, in which the goal isn’t to finish a story but to rack up points. Both games are a far cry from the text-based adventures Wagner pecked out on his ancient Apple.
While Wagner does all the programming and the sprite art for Voxel’s games, he relies on additional artists for music and larger, more intricate backgrounds.
Wagner’s intention is not to go solo. His long-term dream goal is to build a large software company in Santa Maria.
“I could either hire students directly after they complete the computer science program at Hancock or hire students after they complete at Cal Poly or UCSB, and bring them back,” he said enthusiastically.
He wants to combat a problem he sees Santa Maria suffering.
“[Brain drain] refers to people being educated [elsewhere] and coming to America, you know, getting a degree in India and coming over here to America, but we have this on a local scale,” Wagner explained. “We have people just leaving. And so we don’t have any sort of high-tech community here.”
Santa Maria has its share of website developers and niche technology-based companies, but nothing that’s constantly outputting software for the general public, such as Hypergrade, a program that can test student-submitted code. That’s a functional project Wagner uses with his classes and is continually improving.
“I have to be very thankful to my parents because they got me into videogames,” he said with a smirk.
He attributes part of the development of his reading skills to early videogames.
Wagner is very much the enthusiast. He collects arcade games—but not the console re-releases. He collects actual arcade games. Along with his Pacman, Streetfighter, and Neo Geo arcade consoles, he’s managed to procure what he calls his “prized possession.” A full-on Dance Dance Revolution arcade setup.
So far, all of Voxel’s game releases have been for the iPhone. As of yet, there are no plans to release them for Android, due to Android’s apps needing to be written in an entirely different programming language.
The language of Objective C may seem like
gibberish—if ((x<y) && (a==b) || (k<=m)) printf (“That’s complex”);—but to Wagner, it’s what a blank page is to a writer: possibility. Voxel has great potential, and the possibilities are endless given the pace at which technology changes. Computers have gone from blocky, monochromatic beasts to vivid handheld works of art,
giving Wagner more and more blank pages to work with.
Michael McCone has gone from beast to work of art while interning at the Sun. Send comments or questions to intern@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 22-29, 2011.