Warcraft spin-offs in the adventure genre. After agreeing to the project, Blizzard began to generate concept art for Animation Magic, and to develop the game design. The team opted for a purposely conservative approach to the design of Warcraft Adventures. During development, Roper said that the adventure genre had "very defined standards" and expectations, and that Blizzard was "not necessarily looking to make the next great innovation in adventure game interfaces or rewrite the book on how adventure games are done". To this end, the team focused on high-quality storytelling and comic writing, which it perceived as the genre's core traits. Roper later said that Blizzard hoped to copy the features of its favorite adventure games, in contrast to newer entries in the genre, which the team felt lacked an emphasis on plot, puzzles that emerged naturally from the world and strong voice-over work. The team's primary reference points were LucasArts adventure games, particularly the 1995 titles The Dig and Full Throttle, although without the latter's use of arcade-action sequences. Certain Sierra On-Line adventures inspired the team as well. In 2009, IGN's Travis Fahs summarized that the team designed the game "as fans", and sought to borrow from the period's best adventure titles in the way that Warcraft: Orcs & Humans had borrowed from Dune II. Production Production of Warcraft Adventures was split between multiple locations. Although the project direction and design occurred in Irvine, California at Blizzard Entertainment, the code and art were developed by divisions of Animation Magic: the former in Boston, and the latter in Saint Petersburg, Russia. By early 1997, the animation team at the Russian office numbered around 50 members, but this figure rose to roughly 100 by the following year. In addition, Blizzard coordinated with Capitol Multimedia during the project, and by 1998 the South Korean animation studio Toon-Us-In was involved in producing the full motion video animated cutscenes. The direction of the art was a collaborative effort. At the beginning, Bill Roper explained that Blizzard "gave [Animation Magic] a world sheet, which was basically 'Here is the world. This is what the characters are like. Here are sketches of some, some of the descriptions.' " The art team built from this framework, and periodically delivered the results to Blizzard for approval. Animation Magic also offered input on certain game design decisions, although Roper noted that "the vast majority" of Warcraft Adventures design derived