Soda Slinger is my submission to Global Game Jam 2025. It is an arcade-style timing minigame that involves sliding a “soda” along a bar to serve customers. I had a blast making it, met new people, and made a great time collaborating. We only had a weekend so I’m proud of what we were able to achieve.
🔗 Links
👨💻 Process
I’m a longtime fan of Godot Engine, and I was somewhat surprised to find someone else at the game jam who was also interested in using it. We knew that Godot would allow us to export to web easily and make a simple 3D game.
The game was originally supposed to be composed of a bunch of minigames with the Slinger being one of them, like WarioWare. Another minigame idea we had was a 2D physics based pouring game, where you try to fill the mug to the perfect level and avoid spilling. We wanted to have some sort of foam simulation, too. Unfortunatley, we ran out of both inspiration and time for the other games.
For the textures, my jam partner (Alister) suggested taking real royalty free photos and squashing them down in resolution to produce faux-pixel art. I think it looked pretty darn good and was very quick and efficient. I modeled and textured the 3D assets in Blender before importing them into Godot. Alister drew the SpongeBob-esqe jellyfish man for our customer sprite.
Special thanks to GDQuest and their Godot Shaders repository for the nice 3D liquid wobble shader used in the “soda.”
💭 Inspiration
The main inspiration for Soda Slinger was the classic obscure and terrible western game The Town with No Name. The game features a bar minigame which forces the player to watch a painfully long cutscene upon failing to catch the drink. This was naturally the first thing to come into our heads with the theme of the game jam: “Bubble”.