The latest game to take Kickstarter by storm is an indie JRPG called Project Phoenix. The game got so much attention that it was able to achieve its $100,000 fundraising goal within nine hours of being launched on the crowd funding website.

While that would normally be an unexpectedly fast time to reach a Kickstarter goal, it’s not so odd when you consider that the crew working on Project Phoenix are among the biggest names in the industry.

Among the people working on the game are:

• Hiroaki Yura – Director & Producer (Credits include Diablo III and Valkyria Chronicles)
• Vaughan Smith – Lead Game Designer (QA analyst on L.A. Noire)
• Yoko Enoki – Scenario Writer (The Dragon and the Magician novel series, The Black Knight novel series)
• Steffen Unger – Lead 3D Modeler (3D modeler on Halo 4 and Crysis 3)
• Kiyoshi Arai – Art Director / World Concept Artist (Artist on Final Fantasy 3, 12 & 14 and Bloodmasque)
• John Kurlander – Sound Engineer (Recording engineer and score mixer on Lord of the Rings, Skyrim and recent Blizzard games)
• Nobuo Uematsu – Lead Composer (Composer of Final Fantasy 1 – 10 and founder of The Black Mages)

The Kickstarter page also includes a couple of currently anonymous team members. One is the character and monster designer who worked on “some very famous JRPG that everyone knows.” The other is the art supervisor whose credits include “some very famous anime that everyone knows.”

Now, the first question I had was how a team of big names in the industry come together to do a game for $100,000. I’d imagine that’s the first question everyone. Project Phoenix’s Kickstarter page answers the question directly. Those big names mentioned above won’t be taking a salary for their work on the project because they’re already making a living with their other projects. Instead, the fundraised money will go towards 3D modelling work. The big guns involved in the project will be paid a percentage of the profit rather than a salary.

As for the game itself, Project Phoenix is planned to be a JRPG with squad-based RTS game design. It will be released on Windows, Mac and Linux with a modified version released on iOS and Android. There aren’t any set in stone plans for consoles but the team at Creative Intelligence Arts is trying to get Project Phoenix on PlayStation 4. The targeted release date is mid-2015 with the alpha and beta versions dropping in fall of 2014.

As of Tuesday night, Project Phoenix raised over $316,000 which pushed the game over its first stretch goal in about a day. According to KickTraq, it’s trending toward a fundraising total of $4.83 million. For comparison, Torment: Tides of Numenera raised just under $4.2 million and Obsidian’s Project Eternity raised just under $4 million. This could be the biggest game Kickstarted so far.

For more on Project Phoenix, check out their Kickstarter page.