Unity Certified Programmer Exam Guide

Pass the Unity certification exam with the help of expert tips and techniques, 2nd Edition

Philip Walker

• Editore: Packt Publishing
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781803243610
• Argomento: Computer Science
• Categoria: Programming in C#

A practical, illustrated guide to Unity game scripting using C#, along with practice tests, exam tips, and easy-to-follow examples to help you pass the exam and become a professional Unity programmer

Key Features

• Learn essentials of game scripting with Unity and C# to customize aspects of your game
• Tackle challenges in Unity game development and the certification exam using effective techniques and solutions
• Prepare for the latest Unity certification exam using mock tests, exam tips, and self-assessment questions

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 will also enable you to be a part of the Unity community.This study guide will start by building on your understanding of C# programming and taking you through the process of downloading and installing Unity. You'll understand how Unity works and get to grips with the Unity exam's core objectives. 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 modern 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 be able 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 to interact and use Unity s rendering API
• Explore Unity APIs for adding lighting, materials, and textures to your apps
• Write Unity scripts for building interfaces for menu systems, UI navigation, application settings, and much more
• Focus on SOLID principles for writing clean and maintainable Unity applications

Who this book is for

This Unity engine book is for game developers, software developers, mobile app developers, and Unity developers who want to advance in their career and gain gaming industry certification. The book assumes basic knowledge of C# programming and the Unity engine.

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Chapter 1: Setting Up and Structuring Our Project

For some time, Unity has been issuing exams that cover a range of different skills for people who are either graduates, self-taught, or are classed as veterans in their field.

If we check the prerequisites on Unity's website (https://unity.com/products/unity-certifications/professional-programmer), they tell us that this exam isn't for absolute beginners and you need at least 2 years of experience working with Unity and computer programming, including C#. This book will take you through the process of becoming as familiar as possible with Unity and its services, to the point where it might feel like a beginners' course; however, I expect you to know the fundamentals of C# programming, such as what an if statement is, what a function does, and what a class represents. If you don't, I would recommend reading Harrison Ferrone's Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2020 book first (https://www.packtpub.com/product/learning-c-by-developing-games-with-unity-2020-fifth-edition/9781800207806). Be aware that this exam is based on Unity 2020 LTS. This is the second edition of the Unity Professional Programmer exam. You will gain no real benefit following this book installing Unity 2021 and upwards. If anything, you run the risk of becoming disconnected from the learning process of this book as the Editor and general functionality may differ.

As you can imagine, it is sometimes difficult to gauge what level a programmer is at with their experience. Imagine what it's like for an employer to recruit someone. Often, a programmer is judged by their portfolio, but what happens if you're a graduate without one or you lack a large quantity of work because you've been too busy studying? Perhaps you've been a programmer for years but can't show any recent work due to signing non-disclosure agreements? Some employers might look at your CV and not even look at your portfolio as the qualifications just don't look impressive enough. The tests a potential employer can put a developer through can also be unbalanced, unfair, unrealistic, and not challenging enough; it's likely that the employer has grabbed a programmer's questionnaire template off the internet to test you.

However, having qualifications from Unity itself sends a clear message that you've been tested and covered all the fields that acknowledge you as a certified Unity programmer. Even if you have a decent portfolio showing a level of standardization and focus, having qualifications from Unity can give you the edge over someone else in a job application.

This book serves two main purposes:

• To take you through a fun, simple, side-scrolling shooter project with some downloadable art assets and sounds that will cover the core objectives in Unity's exam
• To get you as ready for the exam as possible with regular testing and reviewing

So, if you feel like you don't need to carry out the project, skip to the very end of this book to try out the final mock test—actually, I recommend you do this now. Flick to the back of the book, take the test, and if you don't do as well as you planned (that is, score over 75%), at least you know you have something to learn, and working through the project might help. Don't take the exam too soon after taking the mock test if you aren't happy with your score—you will be going up against your own muscle memory, rather than the knowledge itself.

Unity has split the necessary areas of this exam into six core objectives. We will cover what these objectives are in this chapter before introducing our side-scrolling shooter project, which will cover the majority of the objectives. We will also cover specialized subjects outside of the project, such as networking, VR, and more, in the Appendix section of this book.

Throughout the following chapters, we will refresh ourselves with the general practices of coding—a bit like the dos and don'ts when coding a project. Then, we will get to grips with the genre of the game and, hopefully, get you thinking about how to set up a game framework. Finally, we will download and set up our empty project in Unity and learn about Unity services.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• The six core objectives
• Overview of design patterns
• The SOLID principles
• Designing the Killer Wave game
• The Killer Wave game framework
• Setting up Unity 2020 LTS
• Setting up your Unity project

We won't be doing any coding in this chapter as our focus is on what Unity wants from you in the exam. We will discuss an overview of the methodology and structuring code with design patterns. You may feel tempted to skip some parts because you simply aren't interested, but remember the only reason I am mentioning the majority of this stuff is it's highly likely to come up in the exam. So, please don't feel like I'm punishing you on purpose!

The next section will detail the core objectives covered in this chapter.

The core exam skills covered in this chapter

Working in professional software development teams:

• Setting up your Unity project
• Recognize techniques for structuring scripts for modularity, readability, and reusability.

Technical requirements

Check out the following video to see the Code in Action: https://bit.ly/3klZRqf.

The six core objectives

The exam will mainly focus on scripting and the use of Unity's Application Programming Interface (API), Animation Controller, particles, rendering, and more. The whole idea is to get you familiar with what Unity has to offer you as a programmer. Unity has categorized their exam into core sections, which is a nice way of separating the workload for the exam.

The six core objectives are as follows:

• Programming core interactions
• Working in the art pipeline
• Developing application systems
• Programming for scene and environment design
• Optimizing performance and platforms
• Working in professional software development teams

Let's look at these in more detail.

Programming core interactions

When we load up our first blank scene in Unity, we will be controlling objects (or, as Unity likes to call them, game objects), moving, rotating, and/or expanding them. Not only can you adjust or transform these game objects, but you can also give them components to make them behave like a camera, a light, and/or a piece of animation, and so on. Each one of these components will typically have properties and values. So, for example, a camera component will have properties adjusting its field of view, its background color, and a few other camera-related things. Another example of a component is Rigidbodies. A Rigidbody component is typically used when you want a collision to happen between two game objects. Or what would you want the game object to do when it makes contact with another game object? Will it blow up? Will it collect the other game object? Will it knock it out of the way where one has a greater force? Unity wants you to know how to use these components and game objects. They also want you to know how you can control these objects with a control pad or keyboard controls as if they are characters in a computer game. This may already sound daunting, but you don't need to be a math teacher to be successful (but it's great if you are!). What's so brilliant about Unity is that it does a lot of the hard work for you. All you need to know is what you want and how you want to use it.

To pass the exam, you need to know how to do the following:

• Implement and configure game object behavior and physics
• Implement and configure inputs and controls
• Implement and configure camera views and movement

Let's move on to the second Unity exam core objective—the art.

Working in the art pipeline

As you know, this is a programming exam, so why do we have an exam objective that refers to art? Well, as a programmer, it's highly likely that you will be manipulating game objects to do the things mentioned in the exam objectives. You might not just move something around—you may also want to change a game obj...