MIGS 2016: Notes From Masterclass Session with Vikor Antonov

In 2016, back when I was working at Ubisoft Toronto, I was fortunate enough to be sent to the Montreal Independent Games Summit. The highlight of the week was attending Viktor Antonov’s Masterclass entitled “Designing & Prototyping Sci-Fi Cities“ with my friend and colleague Farid El-Nemr.

When we returned from Montreal, Farid and I compiled our notes so we could run a knowledge sharing session with our colleagues back at the Toronto studio. I came across the presentation deck today as I was doing some tidying up and figured I’d host it online in case anyone might find it of use or simply interesting. There are some intriguing film references at the very end, as a nice reward for venturing through the deck.

The presentation itself is fairly light as Farid and I decided to lean towards spoken commentary when presenting our notes. You can, however, find some of the talking points Farid and I left in the Notes Pane of each slide by downloading the PPT and opening it in a desktop version of PowerPoint. (If you can’t see these in Powerpoint, start on the top navigation bar: find the word “File,” look to the right to find and click the word“View,” then look below to find and click the button labeled “Notes” on the Ribbon.) If you have any questions about the content, feel free to reach out to me.

If the above embed does not work, please try downloading the PPT in full by clicking here. This will likely require you having access to PowerPoint. Alternatively, you might try importing the PPT into Google Slides.

Back in 2016, I left that masterclass with tonnes of notes and references for media to check up on. I don’t feel the talk really lived up to the title in a purely literal or instructional sense but rather offered lots of rare insight into how Antonov worked and guided teams on projects like Dishonored and Half-Life 2, to name a few standouts. Antonov allowed participants to make use of the time by asking questions and asking for feedback on their own projects (if I recall correctly, some staffers from Compulsion Games, working on We Happy Few, were also in attendance with us) so I’d strongly recommend catching Antonov if that sounds interesting to you, should he do a full-day talk like this again. Finally, as a huge fan of a lot of stuff Antonov had a hand in crafting, the session was a really great way to spend a day learning more about them. I’ve definitely internalized a lot of smaller tips and tricks he shared with us. I hope the slides help you in some way too! Knowledge is meant to be shared and not to collect figurative dust, tucked away in some neglected corner of a hard drive, right?