Preface
Unity Certified Programmer: Exam Guide – Second Edition will take a basic object-oriented programmer and introduce them to Unity through a creative project that stretches across the entire book, achieving essential exam core objectives that can be put toward Unity's own Official Programmer Exam.
This book will take you (the programmer) through a discussion of the exam itself, breaking down each of its objectives, and what is expected of you to achieve a pass. From there, everything we'll discuss relates to supporting you with potential questions from the exam. So, we'll start straight away and refer to an overview of common design patterns and even more common SOLID principles that all programmers need to know. We will go through our game design brief and custom-built framework before we even touch Unity.
After installing Unity, you will begin to take your first steps in building a side-scrolling shooter game, and at the beginning of every chapter, it will be brought to your attention which core objectives we will be covering to support you. After some chapters, you will also be tested with a mini mock exam to see how you are getting on.
By the end of the book, you will have created a game that can be played on a standalone PC and/or Android device supporting a keyboard and touch screen controls, where you will fly a spaceship to fight off oncoming enemies.
As early as Chapter 2, Adding and Manipulating Objects, you will have coded the majority of the game, and the following chapters that we'll progress through will introduce you to Unity's tools and components, such as the Timeline, which is specifically built for the TV/film industry and cutscenes in games. You will cover particle effects, different materials to apply to your game objects to make them react to light, fading the sound in and out by manipulating an audio mixer with your scripting, pausing the game, storing values in your own scriptable objects, and much, much more.
Even if you aren't taking the Unity Certified Programmer Exam, you will make a game that you can continue to develop, play, and learn from.
