Teaming Up With Naughty Dog For The Last of Us Part II!

August 27, 2020

Greetings everyone, we hope you’ve been well! First of all, we would like to congratulate Naughty Dog on the successful release of the The Last of Us Part II, which received universal acclaim from critics including 10/10 review scores from several notable gaming review sites such as IGN, Game Informer, Push Square and GamesRadar.

Needless to say, The Last of Us Part II was one of the most highly anticipated video game releases of the year, and we’d also like to give a big thank you to Naughty Dog for having us on board for this huge project!

We’re honored to have been able contribute, and since everyone is excited about the game’s release we thought it would be a good opportunity to talk to Paul Wang, who served as Lemon Sky’s art director for the project, and hear his thoughts about the game and the process of working with Naughty Dog.

Can you introduce yourself and your role at Lemon Sky?

Hello, my name is Paul Wang Koong Choong and I’m the art director at Lemon Sky. 

As the art director, my job is to oversee all the art that is produced for a particular project. I’m responsible for preparing the strategy and game plan for the project, scheduling, checking the art quality of all the assets we create, and submitting the assets to the client.

As part of my duties I spend a lot of time studying the project in-depth and discussing the requirements and expectations with the client. Then I make sure that my project team is able to understand those expectations and deliver them for the client.

How did Lemon Sky contribute to the development of The Last of Us Part II?

We worked on the environment, environment props, weapons, hero props, cut scene assets, clothes and graphic design of the game.

How does Lemon Sky work together with Naughty Dog during the production of games such as The Last of Us Part II and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy?

In these projects, Lemon Sky serves as a premier production house that works closely with Naughty Dog to produce art assets as part of their games development process.

We work closely with the art team at Naughty Dog to determine what assets need to be created along with their requirements, and we continue to stay in close communication throughout the production of the assets, providing them with daily updates on our work.

How many people from Lemon Sky were involved with The Last of Us Part II and what stage of the project did your involvement start from?

We had about 20 people involved with the project throughout the whole process and we were on board from the very early stages of the game’s development. We were one of the rare vendors that was involved from the early stages all the way to the end, and we also helped with polishing up the game in it’s later stages of development.

How long was Lemon Sky involved with The Last of Us Part II development process? 

The whole development process took over 2 years of involvement from us.

Given that The Last of Us Part II was one of the most highly anticipated titles of the year, was there added pressure to deliver? 

It was certainly a big project, but we wouldn’t really say that there was added pressure to deliver because each project is important to us and we are always doing our best to push the bar of quality with each piece of work that we do. In the end, we are just doing our job as an art studio and we’re very grateful to Naughty Dog for having faith in us and giving us a change to contribute to such an important title,

If you can say, what’s the proudest moment/achievement while you working on The Last of Us Part II?

Our proudest moment was being able to see the artwork in the final game and seeing our team appear in the end credits. It made me feel really proud of everyone in the team and what we’ve achieved! We’re grateful that we were able to gain Naughty Dog’s trust and live up to their expectations. We also learned a lot from the project and are proud that they gave us the chance to contribute.

Thank you once again to Naughty Dog for always believing in us and giving us a chance a contribute to your amazing video game titles! Stay tuned to our website, Facebook page and Instagram for more news coming soon!