Unity 3D Playmaker Tutorial - Making Nyan Cat pixel art, animation, and music

Join my discord: https://discord.gg/HQu5Pwfq In this tutorial, I'll show how to create the Nyan Cat pixel art, generating starburst animations in the background and also adding some music. I'll be recreating this using Photoshop, Unity 3D and Playmaker, as well as Audacity to edit the music file.

This tutorial recreates Nyan Cat end to end in Unity: pixel-art cat and rainbow trail, frame animation, a particle trail, generated background starbursts, and music. It is a fun tour of sprite import settings, particle tricks, and a spawn-and-destroy loop in Playmaker, plus quick audio editing in Audacity.

Draw and animate the cat

In Photoshop, create the rainbow trail plus cat parts (tail, feet, head, body) on layers named with .png, then use File, Generate, Image Assets to auto-export them into the project. In Unity, set all sprites to Sprite (2D and UI), filter mode None for crispness, and pixels per unit 32. Assemble the body, then create an animation at a sample rate of 3 to bounce the legs, head, and tail in a loop. Add Lean Touch with a simulator plus Lean Drag Translate and a Lean Constrain Axis so the cat only moves up and down.

Build the rainbow particle trail

Add a particle system with the shape angle and radius set to 0 so particles emit in a straight line. Make a URP unlit particle material using the rainbow PNG as the base map, switch the camera to orthographic, and enable Align to Direction. Rotate the particles so only a thin edge shows (since particles render as squares), then raise rate over time until the trail looks continuous with no gaps.

Generate background starbursts

In Photoshop make a 16x16 burst that expands and dissipates across layers, export, and animate it in Unity (raise pixels per unit so it is visible). Add a Burst Move FSM that translates it at negative 3, and save it as a prefab. On a spawner FSM, use Random Float between negative 5 and 5 for a Y position, Set Position with a fixed X and Z, Create Object to spawn the burst, then a tiny Random Wait of 0 to 0.1 before looping, scattering bursts across the background.

Clean up and add music

To avoid endless objects, give the burst prefab a Get Position every frame and a Float Compare against negative 10; once off-screen, transition to a Destroy Self state. Finally, in Audacity speed up a track downloaded from the YouTube library, export as MP3, and drag it onto the main camera as audio. The scene now plays full Nyan Cat with cat, trail, animated bursts, and music.