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 Taking a Mock Test, 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 how to make use of Unity's raycast system, which shoots invisible rays to help identify game objects, and looks at various 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, covers moving 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 you more familiar with Unity's 2D Canvas, adding polish to each screen by applying image components and custom fonts 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 the creation of a pause screen for each level of the game, which will give options to alter the game's volume controls, as well as quitting and resuming 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 a 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, as well as 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. The answers can be found in the appendix.