Not harsh at all! I'm extremely new to all of this, and wanted to enter the jam intentionally to learn what things I need to work on so I can do better going forward.
The game jam was intended to be a crash course for me; I have virtually no experience writing or programming, and have only just recently started drawing, so right now I'm trying to figure out my strengths and weaknesses and start from there. Getting any constructive feedback from the general public can be like pulling teeth!
For me, these were more like exercises so I can take what I learn and apply it to my bigger project once I have a bit of a foundation to work with. Not that the story was unimportant, I was just putting more focus on the mechanics part; making looping songs, drawing sprites, learning basic Ren'Py from scratch as someone with no experience in coding.
As far as the older wolf's backstory goes, it is actually almost 100% real (minus the being a wolf part), based on my father's life. I knew bits and pieces, but we never really talked about any of it until about a week before he died. The squirrel story, the being dirt poor and being the smallest, his father wanting to hook his sister up to a plow, all of it was really his life growing up.
I had heard many of the stories before from my many aunts and uncles, but never from him. Also all the monologue to psych himself up to talking about how he felt about death; I grew up to never question or interrupt him, and so that last week, I let him speak his peace while he was working out his emotions.
It's the fact it seems so far removed from modern experience that made me want to write about it, because it does sound so unbelievable. The house is still standing (I grew up next to it), and is indeed quite tiny for a family of 16. My kitchen and family room are small, yet still bigger than the entire house.
There are very minor tweaks, or things glossed over for the sake of time, but it is a pretty faithful facsimile of his life. I think the biggest deviation was that the family was forced to move a couple years before he was born instead of after so they could attend school. I also have no idea why my grandmother chased my grandfather around with an axe before, but pulling from what I do know, infidelity may well have been the reason!
The photograph is also based on a real photo, and the story with it as well. One of the few pleasant interactions I ever had with my father was when he showed me the picture a few years ago, and I asked him questions about what colors they were wearing. He didn't realize I was colorizing it in Photoshop while I was talking with him, and he nearly cried when I printed it out for him. He didn't even cry at his mother's funeral, it was a rare moment to see him show any emotion (other than anger or rage of course)!
At the time of making this so early in the jam, I thought it *had* to contain NSFW elements based on some joke comments in the server, so I added it at the very end, and come July, it will be removed. I found out before the end of the jam, but since it had been out for so long, I decided to leave it as it was in case it had already been judged by that point.
Thanks again for your comments!