Ravi Sinha: Let’s get this out of the way: For being a squad based RTS JRPG, did you ever envision that Project Phoenix would have the level of success from its Kickstarter campaign that it did?
Hiroaki Yura: We’re as pleasantly surprised as most people are. Although we had had a few other Kickstarter projects that we looked towards as benchmarks, the reception that Project Phoenix received went beyond expectations. For that, we’d definitely like to thank all of our backers for making this vision a reality and we’ll be hard at work bringing Project Phoenix to life!
Ravi Sinha: How did the idea come about for Project Phoenix? How was Creative Intelligence Arts Inc. formed and how did you finally decide on Kickstarter as the primary mode for funding?
Hiroaki Yura: Project Phoenix started as a humble Tower Defense game aimed at funding another game we have planned at the moment, however as our group grew in staffing, we started getting interest in “doing things to the best of our abilities”. As we threw ideas around, I always loved RPGs and RTS and thought it’d be brilliant if we can put those two together.
CIA is a music company, it is being used as a company currently to host the Kickstarter service, however, we are planning to make a new game studio in the future before release. Kickstarter, well, we always had our aims for Kickstarter supporters since people who use the service often would probably love what we were thinking of, so it wasn’t a decision per say, it was one of earliest goals.
