Name Riva Celso | ||
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Riva Celso (born c. 1974) is an Italian independent video game designer of several critically acclaimed games, including The Goalkeeper, Universal Boxing Manager, Magic Stones, the Heileen series, Bionic Heart, and the award-winning Loren The Amazon Princess.
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Life and game design career
At the age of twenty, Celso began his career, designing small-scale games for the Italian market. He took a seven-year sabbatical until 2003, when he discovered the shareware distribution model and created the sports management 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 game Summer Session, the visual novels 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 programming language and in particular the tool Ren'Py.
The stories of The Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook and The Flower Shop: Winter in Fairbrook were written by Ayu Sakata from sakevisual. Celso is currently working on Planet Stronghold 2, Spirited Heart 2, and a sequel to Loren The Amazon Princess. The RPG Undead Lily is also in production. Furthermore, he is planning a dating sim with homosexual love interests only; the Yuri game Summer in Trigue.
Awards
In 2004, both his games The Goalkeeper and Universal Boxing Manager were nominated among the 5 top Sports Games of the Year by the online magazine Gametunnel. In the 2011 Best Ofs from VNs Now!, Winter Wolves was named "Studio/EVN Circle of the Year".