Celso Riva (born c. 1974) is an Italian

independent Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in Pennsylvania, United States * Independentes (English: Independents), a Portuguese artist ...

video game designer Video game design is the process of designing the rules and content of video games in the Video game development#Pre-production, pre-production stage and designing the gameplay, environment, storyline and characters in the Video game development ...

of several critically acclaimed games, including ''The Goalkeeper'', ''Universal Boxing Manager'', ''Magic Stones'', the '' Heileen'' and '' Vera Blanc'' series, ''Bionic Heart'', and the '' Loren the Amazon Princess''.

Life and game design career

At the age of twenty, Riva began his career, designing small-scale games for the Italian market. He took a seven-year sabbatical until 2003, when he discovered the

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

distribution model and created the

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video game ''Universal Soccer Manager'' using BlitzBasic. He moved to C/C++ language and published 10 more games under the Winter Wolves label, then opened a new company, Tycoon Games, on which he has published 6 games: the space war game ''Supernova 2: Spacewar'', the

dating sim Dating sims, also known as dating simulation games, are a video game subgenre of simulation games with romantic elements. While resembling the visual novel genre in presentation, true dating sims utilize an additional statistical and time manage ...

game ''Summer Session'', the

visual novels A visual novel (VN) is a form of digital interactive fiction. Visual novels are often associated with the medium of video games, but are not always labeled as such themselves. They combine a textual narrative with static or animated illustratio ...

''Heileen'' and ''Bionic Heart'', ''College Romance: Rise Of The Little Brother'', and ''Spirited Heart''. For the games ''Summer Session'' and ''Heileen'', he moved away from C/C++ to embrace

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (prog ...

programming language and in particular the tool

Ren'Py The Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine (or RenPy for short) is a free software game engine which facilitates the creation of visual novels. Ren'Py is a portmanteau of , the Japanese word for 'romantic love', a common element of games made using Ren'Py; a ...

. The stories of The Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook and The Flower Shop: Winter in Fairbrook were written by Ayu Sakata from sakevisual. Starting from 2020, some of his games were ported and published to consoles by Ratalaika Games.

Awards

In 2004, both his games ''The Goalkeeper'' and ''Universal Boxing Manager'' were nominated among the 5 top Sports Games of the Year 2004 Sports Games of the Year Awards
by the online magazine Gametunnel. In the 2011 Best Ofs from VNs Now!, ''Winter Wolves'' was named "Studio/EVN Circle of the Year".

Games

References

Interviews

In The Company of Wolves: Celso Riva Interview
from rockpapershotgun.com
Interview
from gamesetwatch.com
Interview
from pig-min
Interview
from Indie Superstar

External links

Winter Wolves computer games sitegames forumhis personal blogthe games videos on YouTube
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Riva, Celso Video game programmers Living people 1974 births