Thanks for the in-depth review! I'm really glad the story was able to affect you, that's awesome!
My goal for this game jam was to focus on my artstyle and see if I could make an entire small game's worth of art in such a short time. The restriction to only 4 colors was what drew me to this game jam and I was hoping the art would be "striking" enough with that limitation to carry it. You saw my previous game jam game; I spent more than a day and a half just coding the gameplay and ended up having to cut art almost completely. I ended up with cube people and having to scramble at 4:00 in the morning on the last day finishing the level. Between that and recording dialogue, boy did I have my priorities backwards for that one.
I was testing out different techniques with the art and trying to get it to look good, but I was also aware of the time constraints so that once something was "good enough," I didn't have a chance to go back and improve it. Thus why some of the buildings like have really thick outlines, some have really thin outlines, and some have none at all. I finished making the town on Wednesday and didn't figure out the aspect ratio until Thursday, so the whole time I was making the art I had no idea how it would actually look shrunk down, so I tried not to put in too much detail. I also shipped with a funny glitch nobody's noticed yet: the trees around the bridge are just floating in the void to simulate a gully 'cause I didn't have time to make one, and I added the cutscene and dialogue system the next day, so if you turn right on the bridge in the final section you can see the wolf standing in front of his jumpscare backdrop off in the distance.
As for the wolf himself, yeah, I'm aware he looks a lot like Leenie Boog with his long narrow face and his weirdly big arms. I kept it 'cause it was funny and "good enough." There's a reason why you only see him from the front too, those big red eyes of his aren't even connected to the rest of his head. Originally he was supposed to chase you until you found a hiding spot so you'd see those eyes off in the distance, but I cut that and changed it to a simple countdown timer, which fit better with the story anyway. Good thing too, you can't see the eyes from very far away when it's scaled down.
The other big thing that not just you have mentioned is that it's a little confusing at first. Because I made it, I knew where and what everything was and what you were supposed to do, so I just assumed it was intuitive. Likewise, I knew where all the dialogue triggers were so they never caught me off guard. Not sure if I'll update this after the jam, but maybe what I could do is add a call to disable input for half a second so that you don't accidentally skip the dialogue box.
I had a friend of mine play it over the weekend and he too got confused with the movement at the start. I definitely could have improved the art and added more detail to the sides of the road to make navigation easier, but a lot of that was just time constraints and exhaustion from working on it all day. Instructions and a better opening would be a good addition, but I couldn't think of a way to do it quickly so I just put them in the download description.
Oh, and if you're interested in the music, look up Kevin Macleod of Incompetech.com. He makes tons of royalty-free music and he's amassed a huge library of it over the years. The music in this and all the music in Three to One Odds is by him.