United Front tapped into various pedigrees when developing Sleeping Dogs

United Front Games' Stephen Van der Mescht has said the team behind Sleeping Dogs tapped into its racing heritage in order to optimize driving around Hong King "at stupid speeds."

Speaking with the PS Blog, Van der Mescht also said combat in the game was created by experts fro Bully and Radical, so gamers will have the best of both worlds.

"The core of the studio was set up by [former Black Box developers], and there’s obviously a strong driving pedigree running through the game," he said. "We’ve taken a lot of time to optimize our vision of Hong Kong for driving around at stupid speeds. We have these high speed road networks that fit into the city very organically.

"We also pulled in a lot of people from Rockstar who’d been working on PlayStation 2 game Bully as well as guys from Radical, so there’s a whole bunch of expertise there. Open world games are hard to develop and from the very start we wanted all of our bases covered with the talent we have."

Van der Mescht said the team's development strategy was simple: create a game where it felt like the core mechanics could stand on their own.

"If you try the combat system, it’s quite deep for an open world game," he explained. "The ability to seamlessly move from that into gunplay and crazy fast driving maintains that sense of big screen action. You can jump off the back of a car or a bike, so you can see we’ve tried to maintain that cinematic action movie feel."

Sleeping Dogs releases in August on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.