Prepare for the UCA Game Dev exam

You’ve completed all the basic requirements for the course. If you’re interested in taking the Unity Certified Associate: Game Developer exam to acquire the badge, follow along with this tutorial to systematically go through the learning objectives to make sure you’re ready.

If you’re not interested in taking the exam at all, skip down to the bottom of the tutorial, mark it as complete, and move on to the next tutorial to complete the pathway.

The Unity Certified Associate: Game Developer credential is meant for anyone interested in pursuing a career in real-time 3D game development with Unity. If you have this certification, it means that you have a comprehensive understanding of essential techniques for Unity game development.

The exam covers the following 16 distinct domains:

• Animation
• Asset management
• Audio
• Editor interface
• Employment preparedness
• Game art principles
• Game design principles
• Industry awareness
• Lighting
• Materials and effects
• Navigation and pathfinding
• Physics
• Programming
• Project management
• Services
• User interface

In the next steps, you’ll go through each of these topics, reviewing additional material as necessary, to make sure you’re confident going into the exam.

Before you get started actually studying the objectives, it will be helpful to fully understand how the objectives are organized.

Review the format of the objectives

Open the exam outcomes PDF (which is linked from the main credential page), then scroll down to page 10 to get a detailed outline of the topics covered on the exam.

You’ll notice that there are four levels of organization in these objectives:

1. The domain (for example, “1. Animation”).
2. The topic (for example, “1.1 Animator System”).
3. The sub-topic (for example, “a. Animator Controller Asset”).
4. The learning objective (for example, “1. Examine the Animator Controller”).

Read the objectives in context

It’s important to look at the objective in the context of its domain, topic, and subtopic to fully understand what the objective is referring to.

For example, if you read the objective 13-1.1-a-1, which is, “Recognize the purpose of existing code”, you might not be sure precisely what that refers to or where to start when reviewing that objective.

However, look at the objective in the full context:

• Programming - Camera API - ScreenPointToRay - Recognize the purpose of existing code.

With this context, you'll know to focus your attention on the ScreenPointToRay function.

The best way to gauge how prepared you are for the exam is to redo each of the quizzes you completed during this certification prep course. The questions in those quizzes were designed specifically to assess the objectives on this exam. For your convenience, here are links to each of those quizzes:

1. Quiz - Unity fundamentals
2. Quiz - Create a basic 3D game
3. Quiz - Create a basic 2D game
4. Quiz - Plan your game
5. Quiz - Audio
6. Quiz - VFX
7. Quiz - UI
8. Quiz - Animation
9. Quiz - Materials
10. Quiz - Lighting
11. Quiz - Iterate on your game

Each quiz will take you approximately ten minutes to complete, so re-doing all of these quizzes will take you 1.5-2 hours to complete. For any questions you get wrong, make sure to review the feedback so that you understand why your answer was incorrect.

If you are getting 90% or more of the questions on those quizzes correct, you’re probably ready for the exam!

We’ve provided you with a comprehensive study guide that will allow you to go through the objectives one at a time to double-check that you are familiar with each one.

To best utilize the study guide, follow these instructions:

1. Make a copy of the checklist:

• Create a copy of the UCA Game Dev Objectives Checklist spreadsheet.
• If you don’t have a Google account, you can Excel or PDF version of the spreadsheet, but the latter won't be as interactive..

2. Review the format of the checklist:

• Column A: Checkboxes — As you go through the spreadsheet, you can track your progress using the checkboxes. When you feel comfortable with an objective, you can check it off and see your progress percentage go up.
• Column B: Learning Objectives — Each of the learning objectives is listed, along with the domain, topic, and subtopic it’s a part of.
• Column C: Sample Question Prompt — If there’s a specific question dedicated to this objective from the course, the question prompt will be listed in this column. This can help give you a better picture of the type of question you might expect about any objective.
• Column D: Quiz Questions — If there are any quiz questions about this topic, they’re listed here in the following format: unitNumber.questionNumber. For example, 6.2 refers to Unit 6 quiz, question number two. If you are unsure about an objective, you may want to go and check out that specific quiz question to test your knowledge.
• Column E: Lesson Coverage — If there are lessons from the course that cover the objective, they will be listed here. If you are unsure about an objective, you may want to go back and review the lessons listed to refresh your memory.
• Column F: Documentation Link — For further reading on any topic, the relevant documentation from Unity’s manual or scripting documentation is listed here.

3. Systematically go through the objectives:

• There are 135 objectives listed and there are about 100 questions on the exam, which means you should expect to see one question on most of the objectives listed.
• Go through the checklist one row at a time and make sure you feel comfortable with each one. When you’ve gone through them all, you should feel confident for the exam!

If you’ve followed the review instructions above, you are ready to take the exam. If your exam is not scheduled for a while, you may want to revisit this tutorial as a refresher before you attempt it. In the next tutorial, you’ll finalize your game and complete the pathway.