Unity Certified Programmer Exam Guide

▶Book Description
Unity Certified Programmer is a global certification program by Unity for anyone looking to become a professional Unity developer. The official Unity programmer exam will not only validate your Unity knowledge and skills, but also enable you to be part of the Unity community.

This study guide will start by building on your understanding of C# programming and take you through the process of downloading and installing Unity. You’ll understand how Unity works and get to grips with the core objectives of the Unity exam. As you advance, you’ll enhance your skills by creating an enjoyable side-scrolling shooter game that can be played within the Unity Editor or any recent Android mobile device. This Unity book will test your knowledge with self-assessment questions and help you take your skills to an advanced level by working with Unity tools such as the Animator, Particle Effects, Lighting, UI/UX, Scriptable Objects, and debugging.

By the end of this book, you’ll have developed a solid understanding of the different tools in Unity and understand how to create impressive Unity applications by making the most of its toolset.

▶What You Will Learn
- Discover techniques for writing modular, readable, and reusable scripts in Unity
- Implement and configure objects, physics, controls, and movements for your game projects
- Understand 2D and 3D animation and write scripts that interact with Unity's Rendering API
- Explore Unity APIs for adding lighting, materials, and texture to your apps
- Write Unity scripts for building interfaces for menu systems, UI navigation, application settings, and much more
- Delve into SOLID principles for writing clean and maintainable Unity applications

▶Key Features
- Discover the essentials of game scripting with Unity and C# to customize every aspect of your game
Overcome challenges in Unity game development using effective techniques and easy solutions
- Pass the Unity certification exam with the help of mock tests, exam tips, and self-assessment questions

▶Who This Book Is For
The book is for game developers, software developers, mobile app developers, and Unity developers who want to advance in the game or related industry. Basic knowledge of C# programming and Unity engine is required.

▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Setting Up and Structuring Our Project, introduces what is expected of you in the exam, discusses SOLID principles, and gives an overview of design patterns. You will also see how we are going to create our game by looking at its framework and version control.

- Chapter 2, Adding and Manipulating Objects, gets you started with coding and importing 3D assets to get the basics of the game functioning.

- Chapter 3, Managing Scripts and Mock Tests, extends the game out into menu screens, adding sound, adding a scoring system, and ending with the first mock exam.

- Chapter 4, Applying Art, Animation, and Particles, focuses on understanding materials, animating textures, and creating particle systems.

- Chapter 5, Creating a Shop Scene for Our Game, introduces the shop scene and making use of Unity's raycast system, which shoots invisible rays to help identify game objects, and looks at uses of scriptable objects for filling out content.

- Chapter 6, Purchasing In-Game Items and Advertisements, covers making the shop scene have a working in-game balance to buy upgrades and introduce users to watch adverts to gain extra in-game credits. By the end of the chapter, the player will be able to make use of firing a new weapon and taking extra hits from enemies with their bought shield.

- Chapter 7, Creating a Game Loop and Mock Test, moves through each screen until the game loops back to the beginning to create a game loop, finishing off with a mock test that has questions on the material learned so far.

- Chapter 8, Adding Custom Fonts and UI, gets more familiar with Unity's 2D Canvas, adding polish to each screen by applying image components and custom font and animating each level's title.

- Chapter 9, Creating a 2D Shop Interface and In-Game HUD, takes the shop scene from looking less like a prototype to more polished and functioning to support various screen aspect ratios. This chapter also introduces an in-game life, map, and score system.

- Chapter 10, Pausing the Game, Altering Sound, and a Mock Test, covers creating a pause screen for each level of the game, which will give options to alter the game's volume controls, quit and resume the game, followed by a mock test to check your knowledge of the chapter.

- Chapter 11, Storing Data and Audio Mixer, makes use of Unity's own PlayerPrefs and compares it with JSON and storing data in the cloud with remote settings.

- Chapter 12, NavMesh, Timeline, and Mock Test, introduces a new enemy that attempts to escape the player with the use of AI and looks at animating a boss into the scene with the use of Unity's animation tool, Timeline, and extending its functionality to animate flashing lights. There's another mock test at the end of the chapter to see how well things are going.

- Chapter 13, Effects, Testing, Performance, and Alt Controls, discusses making use of colliders, rigidbody properties, visual effect post-processing, global lighting, and reflection probes. This chapter also looks at further gameplay functionality to support mobile controls, building, and testing the game on PC and mobile.

- Chapter 14, Full Unity Programmer Mock Exam, includes over 90 questions to answer and to test you on what you've learned from all 13 chapters and the answers will be found in the appendix.