Magic Leap sponsored Game Jam at UT Austin
“Meet the Devs” interview livestream (click ^)
Featured Accomplishments
About Me,
I’m Clayton Stamper, a passionate game developer - indie & professional
INDIE SAGA - 2015-Now
I began indie game development in 2015, where I solo-developed and shipped 3 apps and 1 (incomplete) steam game. Now, I’ve started developing “Dungeon Break” with the mission to deliver a “shonen fantasy” through an RPG.
RESEARCH SAGA - 2016-2020
I published two research papers as lead engineer at my university’s VR tech lab. Subsequently, I started and led and the VR Development Student Group, where I received a “Certificate of Outstanding Service” from the university for providing hackathons, seminars, food, equipment, and prizes for 200+ students.
STARTUP SAGA - 2019-2020
At Spatial Cinematics, we developed a variety of commercial software for education/training. I contributed 3D modeling, shaders, and optimizing for mobile, VR, and web platforms in addition to programming.
AAA SAGA - 2020-Now
Ashes of Creation launched (early access) on Steam targeting unprecedented scale at launch with seamless (10k CCU + 1k local density) in UE5. I led the narrative engineering team to “Alpha 2” launch, spearheading various client & server-side solutions. My team of four engineers delivered content systems for: quests, events, dialog, interactables, FTUE (first-time user experience), character customization, and more.
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Ashes of Creation - Character Creator
I led a striketeam to deliver this best-in-class character creator with drag-and-drop decals, interactive sculpting, and in-depth hair options.
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Ashes of Creation - Narrative Event System
At (alpha) launch, a single event instance could sustain hundreds of participants split across 4 server meshes while servicing caravan, siege, and war systems realm-wide
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ARTS Fistula Catheter Training Simulation (Unity3D)
I authored all models, rigs, animations, textures, and shaders in this realtime render. IK driven catheters lerp across splines baked from stl blood vessel scans in this training sim.
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Skateboards.com 3D Board Studio
I made all of the .gltf 3D assets in this realtime skateboard builder that we shipped on 3JS.
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Global Game Jam (Austin) 2019 - Runner Up
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VR Student Development Group (2018)
As president of VRDG, we provided hands-on game dev seminars to hundreds of students
2026 - Dev Log
Dungeon Break Character Pipeline
Tech demo leading up to my v0.4 build, which leverages UE’s in-engine character system with some hand-done stylization using external sculpting tools (Nomad & Blender) and a physically based celshader (tutorial) which then leverage lumen.
Dungeon break now has:
Metahuman characters
Melee and ranged RTS-lite combat
Combat skills and attributes that level up from experience
Innovative interactive narrative system
Ashes Alpha of Creation Steam Early Access Launch
Leading up to our steam launch, I snuck in “duels” ahead of production timelines, because I knew how important it was as a player. I took risks, and I made a positive impacts on our launch. That was a trend of mine… I delivered “auto-follow” ahead of schedule as well, built on my generalized pathing tech that I created for seamless mounting. Similarly, our “character paper-doll render” was built on my general-purpose realtime renderer subsystem from the character creator, which provided a smart-pointer based “handle” API for the UI engineering team.
After launch, our studio imploded: everyone was layed-off immediately with no further pay due to private equity disputes. We devs poured our hearts into it, and the community felt it. I personally played 600+ hours after our Steam launch, and I’m certain that many players remember my character fondly: “Kazuto”, the conjurer & traveling fish merchant.
2025 - Dev Log
Ashes Alpha 2 (Phase 3) Launch
My narrative team was dissolved, and I was moved to the “vehicles & mounts team”, where I implemented:
Rewrote NetCode for interserver hostility queries
Implemented Siege vehicle deployable items
Componentized and hardened alignments, decoupling them from game types
Seamless mounting/dismounting mechanics
Auto follow (recycled auto-pathing tech from mounting)
Core Service implementation - generalized actor tracking service & components
Dungeon Break v0.3.1
At the start of 2025, I made the ever-so difficult decision to scrap my 0.2 iteration of Dungeon Break, my indie game. The game mechanics were too complex to scale content pipelines as a solo dev, so I redesigned it. Instead 3D action-combat, I converted to 2.5D RTS-lite mechanics.
2024 - Dev Log
Dungeon Break v0.2
I scrapped v0.1, keeping the fast-paced action combat, but significantly reducing the scope of moment-to-moment gameplay; instead of an over the shoulder perspective with 3D flight mechanics, I opted for a simpler top-down perspective, and a souls-lite animation driven combat.
Ashes Alpha 2 Launch
Intrepid’s biggest launch yet, and I was in a pseudo-lead position for narrative engineering. I crunched throughout the year to compensate for tech debt accumulated by livestreams, but the launch was successful, and I learned a lot.
A single world event achieved hundreds of concurrent participants, split seamlessly across 4 server-workers. (ex. timestamped link) in a seamless open-world with thousands of concurrent players.
The character creator’s content pipeline opened up, supporting 5 races at launch (surpassing our targeted 3 races) with intricate, and efficient modular appearances, and including a stunning character selection menu.
2023 - Dev Log
Founding a Narrative Team
This is a slide from my (approved) proposal to lead game-engineering for narrative and character appearance systems.
“You have earned the ability, through your work ethic, through your work quality, through your dedication and passion, to come and say […] I need help making this shit for Alpha 2.” - Steven Shariff, CEO.
Just prior to this, I had been temporarily allocated to the economy team as an IC, where I implemented vendors, reward tables, currency, and (backend) seasons & weather systems.
other notable contributions:
Character Alignments (dynamic stacking hostilities)
Service Template & Packet Macros: unified gameplay’s integration of IntrepidNet microservices
Event System Livestream
note: watch the attached video for my livestreamed interview
To culminate my efforts for the year at Intrepid, my narrative event system dynamically spawns content into single occupant locales.
IntrepidNet (Intrepid’s server-meshing backend) was brand new, so the event system was ported from a UE subsystem to an INet service at the start of the year, synchronizing shared content delivery seamlessly across spatial server boundaries.
2022 - Dev Log
Animation Studies
note: full portolio breakdown, here
Working on Ashes Creation revealed a gap in my technical knowledge: animation. To grow from this, I followed multiple tutorial series to practice my animation skills, with P2Design Academy being my preferred learning resource.
Moreover, my animation pipeline was uncertain for v0.1 (“Project MC”) of Dungeon Break. With that (among other reasons), I scrapped that prototype, and I started on v0.2 with the gameplay centered around animation. Combat was souls-lite, but the animation-centric combat design ultimately constrained my content pipeline.
Best-in-Class Character Creator
note: see my livestreamed interview with CEO & Leadership
My technical proposal for this tech demo was disseminated as a template for future proposals: leadership loved the pitch.
I lead a 1-month striketeam with 18 contributors to film this livestream, working interdisciplinary to define asset standards and implement our character shader (UE5 material graph) while ensuring network and graphics performance.
Using joints, morphs, and materials, each preset was authored in-engine using the creator within a continuous range inputs that was efficient to replicate leveraging amortization.
p.s.: yes, we made Asmongold as a preset, and we made him bald… that was my idea.
2021 - Dev Log
Ashes of Creation Alpha 1
My career with Intrepid hit significant turning point after 7 months. From fixing bugs to implementing minor features, I was eventually designated “owner” of our narrative event system. Sadly, the system fell short of our Alpha 1 testing window, because of packaged-only bugs related to server meshing.
Key Contributions:
Character rendering optimizations: UDIM based draw call batching and dynamic mesh merging
Cheater detection and CS tooling for identifying and banning bad actors
Project MC is Born
My mission began: “deliver the shonen anime fantasy through an RPG.” I started designing, prototyping, concepting, and writing with this goal in mind, but very little of that work survived to “Dungeon Break" being formalized as the shipped title.
This prototype targeted a very literal interpretation of the shonen fantasy, with 3D flight mechanics, fast paced action combat, and destructible environments.
2020 - Dev Log
ARTS VR Training Simulation
This training simulation was made in Unity3D for the BD WavelinQ™ procedure, where two magnetic catheters are used to create an AV fistula without open surgery.
I retopologized the provided .stl scan of a patient’s blood vessel to have uniform edge loops. From there, I wrote a C# to bake splines nodes into the center point of each edge loop. I rigged the catheter with 5 joints on each side, and drove IK targets along the spline.
I wrote shaders to render the simulation like a fluoroscopy, including a fluid-sim shader for the blood vessels to simulate ink injections.
Skateboards.com 3D Studio
note: see full portfolio piece here
At Spatial Cinematics, we built a web studio for customizing purchasable skate boards in 3D. I modeled the wheels, trucks, and board in Blender, and I authored the textures in Substance Painter.
For a tight asset pipeline, I baked substance smart material masks into vertex color channels on the mesh.
2019 - Dev Log
First Shipped Steam Title
“Tuition” was a capstone project in my indie, game development studies. I published it on Steam, but it was never finished. As a “game” it had potential, but it ended up being a glorified tech demo; the technical features were there, but it needed content, better UX, and FTUE
. Features included:
Gunplay with VFX, SFX, and hit impulse physics
Knives and swords that could visually “cut” targets.
Climbing
Fortified defenses / barriers that zombies would tear through
Wave-based spawn mechanics, modeled as logistic growth
Global Gam Jam 2019
Runner up (“Best Use of a Lantern” officially) - an ominous 2D platformer with a unique physically based combat, where a lantern (i.e. your weapon) follows behind your pawn tethered using verlet integration.
2018 - Dev Log
More is on the way…
Collecting some of my older portfolio pieces is a challenge, but I plan to highlight my development & growth all the way back to 2015
Shogi World
This was the 3rd app that I published on both app stores (Android & Apple). Shogi is a Japanese sibling to Chess, but it’s uncommon to localize into English, which I addressed using mesh UVs.
Technical Features:
Minimax algorithm for AI.
Local Co-op
Settings menu