Next Steps - Introduction

Lesson 6.1 - Project Optimization

Lesson 6.2 - Research and Troubleshooting

Lesson 6.3 - Sharing your Projects

ECS Survival Guide

Career research and preparation

Introduction to portfolios

Debug the App

Counting Prototype

Quiz: Create with Code 2

Prepare to continue developing your Unity and C# skills independently, including learning how to complete your personal project.

In this Mission, you'll prepare to continue developing your Unity and C# skills independently, including learning how to complete your personal project and how to prepare for the Unity Certified User: Programming exam, which you can take through your school program, if available.

Publishing Your Project

Unity Junior Programmer

Kickstart your programming career with Unity's Junior Programmer Pathway. Learn coding fundamentals, C#, and game development to create your first interactive projects. Start learning for free!

Junior Programmer Pathway - Learn Coding & Game Development | Unity Learn

We recommend that you have basic knowledge of Unity or complete 

Ready to code? This guided learning Pathway will take you from zero to job-ready!

Welcome to Junior Programmer! Designed for anyone interested in learning to code or obtaining an entry-level Unity role, this pathway assumes a basic knowledge of Unity and has no math prerequisites. Junior Programmer prepares you to get Unity Certified so that you can demonstrate your job-readiness to employers.

Junior Programmer

Course Introduction

Install Unity Software

Unit 1 - Introduction

Lesson 1.1 - Start your 3D Engines

Lesson 1.2 - Pedal to the Metal

Lesson 1.3 - High Speed Chase

Lesson 1.4 - Step into the Driver's Seat

Challenge 1 - Plane Programming

Lab 1 - Project Design Document

Introduction to project management and teamwork

Quiz 1

Lesson 1.1 - Start your 3D Engines 

Learn how to create new C# scripts, call basic functions, and use variables to modify the results of those functions.

In this first mission in the Junior Programmer pathway, you will program a car moving side-to-side on a floating road, trying to avoid (or hit) obstacles in the way. In addition to becoming familiar with the Unity editor and workflow, you will learn how to create new C# scripts and do some simple programming. By the end of the Unit, you will be able to call basic functions, then declare and tweak new variables to modify the results of those functions.

Player Control

Unit 2 - Introduction

Lesson 2.1 - Player Positioning

Lesson 2.2 - Food Flight

Lesson 2.3 - Random Animal Stampede

Lesson 2.4 - Collision Decisions

Challenge 2 - Play Fetch

Lab 2 - New Project with Primitives

Quiz 2

Mod the Cube

Quiz: Create with Code 1

Gain familiarity with some of the most important programming and Unity concepts, including if-then statements, random value generation, arrays, collision detection, prefabs, and instantiation.

In this Mission, you will program a top-down game with the objective of throwing food to hungry animals - who are stampeding towards you - before they can run past you. In order to do this, you will become much more familiar with some of the most important programming and Unity concepts, including if-then statements, random value generation, arrays, collision detection, prefabs, and instantiation. In completing this Unit, you will learn how to program a basic game with the ability to launch projectiles and maneuver the player to keep the game alive.

Basic Gameplay

Unit 3 - Introduction

Lesson 3.1 - Jump Force

Lesson 3.2 - Make the World Whiz By

Lesson 3.3 - Don't Just Stand There

Lesson 3.4 - Particles and Sound Effects

Challenge 3 - Balloons, Bombs, & Booleans

Lab 3 - Player Control

Quiz 3

Learn how to add music, sound effects, and visual particle effects to transform the experience of your project.

In this Mission, you will program a fast-paced endless side-scrolling runner game where the player needs to time jumps over oncoming obstacles to avoid crashing. In creating this prototype, you will learn how to add music and sound effects, completely transforming the experience of your projects. You will also learn how to create dynamic endless repeating backgrounds, which are critical for any side-scrolling games. Finally, you will learn to incorporate particle effects like splatters and explosions, which make your games so much more satisfying to play.

Sound and Effects

Unit 4 - Introduction

Lesson 4.1 - Watch Where You’re Going

Lesson 4.2 - Follow the Player

Lesson 4.3 - PowerUp and CountDown

Lesson 4.4 - For-Loops For Waves

Challenge 4 - Soccer Scripting

Lab 4 - Basic Gameplay

Quiz 4

Learn how to implement new gameplay mechanics including powerups and increasing difficulty.

In this Mission, you will program an arcade-style Sumo battle with the objective of knocking increasingly difficult waves of enemies off of a floating island, using power ups to help defeat them. In creating this prototype, you will learn how to implement new gameplay mechanics into your projects, which are new rules or systems that make the game more interesting to play. On one hand, you will learn to program a powerup, which give the player a temporary advantage. On the other hand, you will learn to program increasingly difficult enemy waves, which make survival more challenging for the player. A good balance of powerups and increasing difficulty make for a much more interesting gameplay experience.

Gameplay Mechanics

Unit 5 - Introduction

Lesson 5.1 - Clicky Mouse

Lesson 5.2 - Keeping Score

Lesson 5.3 - Game Over

Lesson 5.4 - What’s the Difficulty?

Challenge 5 - Whack-a-Food

Lab 5 - Swap out your Assets

Quiz 5

Introduction to user feedback and testing

Learn how to implement a User Interface - or UI - into your projects, such as a title screen and score display.

In this Mission, you will program a game to test the player’s reflexes, where the goal is to click and destroy objects randomly tossed in the air before they can fall off the screen. In creating this prototype, you will learn how to implement a User Interface - or UI - into your projects. You will add a title screen with a difficulty select menu that will control how challenging the gameplay is, you will add a score display that will track how many points the player has earned, and you will add a Game Over screen, which will allow the player to restart and try again. In learning these skills, you will be able to create a fully “playable” experience that the user can enjoy from start to finish without having to restart the application to try it again.

User Interface

Introduction to real-time 3D experience design

Set up version control

Explore the sample project

Principles of object-oriented programming

Create a scene flow

Implement data persistence between scenes

Implement data persistence between sessions

Quiz: Manage scene flow and data

Submission: Data persistence in a new repo

Learn about data persistence and an introduction to the core pillars of object-oriented programming.

In this mission, you’ll learn about data persistence, or how to manage the loading and unloading of data between both scenes and sessions. Along the way, you will be introduced to the core pillars of object-oriented programming, which will help you structure your code throughout the mission. There will only be one practical example throughout the mission, which will build on the new functionality you create with each tutorial. At the end of this mission, you’ll take everything you learned and apply it to a new project by building a persistent score system for a small game.

Manage Scene Flow and Data

Abstraction in object-oriented programming

Inheritance and polymorphism in object-oriented programming

Encapsulation in object-oriented programming

Profile code to identify issues

Job preparation: Junior Programmer

Quiz: Apply object-oriented principles

Submission: Programming theory in action

Deep-dive into the pillars of object-oriented programming and their application, then learn how to profile and optimize code.

In this mission, you’ll refactor the inventory project you completed in the previous mission using the pillars of object-oriented programming as a guide. You’ll deep dive into the inner workings of each pillar individually, so you can better understand its value in developing applications. Next, you’ll learn how to profile your code to identify any optimization bottlenecks that would slow down the final build of your application. To close out this mission, you’ll develop a small application for your portfolio that uses fully optimized code built on OOP principles. 

When you complete this mission you will complete the Junior Programmer pathway - CONGRATULATIONS!

Apply Object-Oriented Principles

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Variable Attributes

Unity Event Functions

Object Pooling

Lesson Recap

Control the execution of code with common logic structures 

Level 1 Application Scripting

Joy Horvath

Instructional Designer

CWC_U6.L1.S1.mp4

CWC_U6.L1.S2.mp4

CWC_U6.L1.S3.mp4

In this lesson, you will learn about a variety of different techniques to optimize your projects and make them more performant. You may not notice a huge difference in these small prototype projects, but when you’re exporting a larger project, especially one for mobile or web, every bit of performance improvement is critical. 

Several of your prototype projects will have improved optimization, serving as examples for you to implement in your personal projects

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

Recognize and use new variable attributes to keep values private, but still editable in the inspector

Use the appropriate Unity Event Functions (e.g. Update vs. FixedUpdate vs. LateUpdate) to make your project run as smoothly as possible

Understand the concept of Object Pooling, and appreciate when it can be used to optimize your project

Initialize variables of a given data type, including ints, floats, doubles, bools, strings, arrays, lists, and dictionaries

Select the correct data type for a variable in a given situation

Select appropriate variable modifiers including public, private, static, protected, and const

Implement appropriate data types

Reduce redundancy and improve code's readability by correctly naming variables and methods

Describe common naming conventions including PascalCase and camelCase

Cultivate a code style that is efficient and easy to read

Object Pooling.zip

Next Steps

Create with Code - Unit 6: Optimization & QA

Next Steps (Unity EdLab Edition)

In the course, we only ever used “public” or “private” variables, but there are a lot of other variable attributes you should be familiar with.

Open your Prototype 1 project and open the PlayerController.cs script

Replace the keyword “private” with [SerializeField], then edit the values in the inspector

In FollowPlayer.cs, add the [SerializeField] attribute to the Vector3 offset variable

Try applying the “readonly”, “const”, or “static” attributes, noticing that all have the effect of removing the variable from the inspector

In the course we only ever used the default Update() and Start() event functions, but there are others you might want to use in different circumstances.

Duplicate your main Camera, rename it “Secondary Camera”, then deactivate the Main Camera

Reposition the Secondary camera in a first-person view, then edit the offset variable to match that position

Run your project and notice how choppy it is

In PlayerController.cs, change “Update” to “FixedUpdate”, and in FollowPlayer.cs, change “Update” to “LateUpdate”, then test again

Delete the Start() function in both scripts, then reactivate your Main Camera

Throughout the course, we’ve created a lot of prototypes that instantiated and destroyed objects during gameplay, but there’s actually a more performant / efficient way to do that called Object Pooling.

Delete the DetectCollisions, PlayerController, and DestroyOutOfBounds scripts from your project

Download the Object Pooling unity package and import it into your scene

Reattach the PlayerController script to your player. Reattach DestroyOutOfBounds script to your animal and food prefabs, and then reattach the DetectCollisions script to your animal prefabs (not to your food prefab)

Attach the ObjectPooler script to your Spawn Manager, drag your food projectile into the “Objects To Pool” variable, and set the “Amount To Pool” to 20 

Lesson 6.1 - Project Optimization

1. Variable Attributes

2. Unity Event Functions

3. Object Pooling

4. Lesson Recap

Complete this tutorial