Software

Software AKA tools of the trade, exluding the wacom tablet which is practically a given.
A lot of people say the Adobe suite or macromedia if you're seriously hanging on. I am no different in that regard. I generally use fireworks or photoshop for a majority of art, and audition for mixing and mastering music and audio that I generally create with FL Studio and various plugins for it such as toxic biohazard, and ohmicide.
The big program, the all important 3d work, is 3d max hands down, if I ever had to give it up though I'd go with lightwave before maya.
I use my own compiler for most custom programs when I actually bother to make something like that.
For example I've made an interesting brute forcer, dictionary and password generator, encrypter, cryptoanalysis, dock (like rocket dock, just my take on the idea anyway), and right now I'm working on a photo viewer with built in tagger, think of it like scan lovers or ehentai, I give a photo a list of tags and rate them according to relevancy, this makes finding photos much easier, right now they're in a series of folders with vague categories but not much detail. If I wanted to find say a particular motivational poster I'd go into my motivationals and find if it's a regular, demotivational, or comedic then browse till I find it, instead of just searching for lava or people or anime w/e I happen to know is in it. When I'm done with that I'll be immediately starting work on a replacement for a program on this list called Final Draft which I'll discuss next. Basically it'll be a story writing program,
These are the details of the program, if you want to beat me to it, maybe make some money feel free because I'll be releasing my version open source and freeware for all when I'm done, which may take a year or two.
organized system for viewing stories or making them
add scenes, chapters, acts, charater names
add camera movements or perspectives
add locations
pop up viewer over locations that you can link to existing photos / art files on drive
simple () and similar options for quickly adding a new character or other item, and autofill in options/suggestions
highlights text based on movement, speech, action, etc, changes its color
same goes for types, character, enviro, scene, act, chapter, etc
go to file and have "add" function for adding new stuff without typing
quick browsing option on the left for jumping to act, scene, chapter, etc
option to view only X option, such as all actions by X character, or all "lines" /speech or all instances of X environment
Character Bio's /profiles
ability to import things from other files, characters, environments, bio's, etc
ability to define alternate versions of scene and interchange them with notice for letting you know there's an alt version of a scene
side by side viewing of the same file or multiple files
clicking a character name or environment name etc brings up relevent information in a popup, which is editable
commenting options
ability to post to internet and collect feedback on it
previous versions option
autosave
option to configure previous versions and increase/decrease # of versions to keep
option to configure autosave for X time, after newly entered text, on backspace/delete

Final Draft is what I'm using right now as a stand in for the above program. It does what it's supposed to but it could easily be so much better hence my plans to make the above program. Basically it's a simplistic / minimalistic story writing program directed towards movie makers.

I do most of my programming in Notepad++
If you're not into such manual and unforgiving programming, I suggest a good IDE like netbeans.
A good engine is essential when making a game, there's a lot of good options out there, right now I'm experimenting with Unreal / UDK to see how it fits.

This list is actually pretty short, all you really need is 3d max, photoshop, UDK and a lot of time and or a good mind, knowledge of some kind of programming laguage is necessary preferably C++ and Java or some other object oriented language. With those tools at your disposal you can make something, not sure how good it'll be but it'll be something, and it's been said that if you can do anything half-assed you're a one eyed man in the land of the blind.