Adobe is the industry leader when it comes to software for graphic design in various media. Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash are taught in most art schools across a range of disciplines. In order for budding games designers to learn how to create, manipulate and animate graphics, they must first learn these programs. Illustrator is used to create vector graphics for many mediums. Photoshop is a companion tool for Illustrator and allows users to create bitmap images as well as manipulate graphics created with Illustrator and in many other formats. Designers use Flash to develop animation and interactive graphics from vector and bitmap images.
Premier Pro and Final Cut Pro are used in post-production of video and film. They both capture video from a variety of sources and a range of formats. Premier Pro is an Adobe product. Its direct competitor is Apple's Final Cut Pro. After Effects is a tool for creating visual effects for film and video. It works seamlessly with Premier Pro. While Premier Pro and After Effects are cross-platform tools that can run on Windows and Mac OS operating systems, Final Cut Pro is designed strictly for Mac OS.
Autodesk Maya is a powerful program that gives designers extensive tools for 3D animation, effects, rendering, simulations, modeling and more. It is widely used in the entertainment industry across many genres including animation studios, television networks and film production companies. Many schools offer several classes on different aspects of the software because it is so complex. Students learn the programming language it is built on, C++, as well as the software's own scripting language called Maya Embedded Language (MEL).
The Unreal Game Engine is a game development framework that is the basis of many popular games. It is a written in C++ and many developers use it to create for the Xbox and PlayStation. It can import data from Autodesk Maya and other programs. Gaming designers write code call Unreal Script for the engine. The company that makes the software, GT Interactive, also manufactures a game called "Unreal."