What do professional video game designers use to make games?

Question

Do they use special progams like C++?

Answer 1

There are many ways to develop games. Modern games for the XBox and many for Windows are written using Microsoft's XNA Game Studio (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/default.aspx ) - a very powerful and sophisticated game development environment. Other platforms have their own SDK (software development kits) as well. Many game studios will develop their own platforms, and c++ is one of the most common languages for this.

And as I said, c++ is not a program, it is a language. There is a number of studios and software packages that are designed for writing and compiling programs in c++.