the time they had presented him with a near-final build, Kirkman told the Telltale team, "Holy shit guys, you did it", according to the game's co-lead developer Jake Rodkin. Connors stated that from a gameplay perspective, they had looked to games such as Heavy Rain and the Uncharted series as a basis for in-game cinematics, while the idea of giving the player choice was influenced by the Mass Effect series. In addition to the television version of The Walking Dead, Telltale took cues from Game of Thrones and Mad Men in terms of how to develop characters within a brief time. Connors also noted that he found that traditional conversation trees did not possess "a believable rhythm" to dialog, and developed a conversion system, using timed input, to create more natural-sounding dialog. The game's story was written with the final scene in the fifth episode, where Clementine either shoots Lee or walks away to let him become a walker, as the established ending that the game would build towards. As such, the character of Clementine was considered critical to the game's writing, and the team spent much time making her the "moral compass" for the game, while assuring that as a child character, she would not come off to the player as whining or annoying. Similarly, the scene with the Stranger in the hotel room was planned very early in development, and also used to review the player's decisions on a moral basis, allowing the player to respond, if they desired, to the allegations. Each episode was developed by pairing a writer and a game designer so that the plot and gameplay style for that episode would work in cooperation and avoid having one feel detached from the other, according to Vanaman. As such, certain gameplay ideas were left out of the game; one example given by Vanaman was a scene where everyone in the survivor group was firing on a wall of zombies, but as this would lead to a discrete success or failure, it did not fit in with the sense of panic they wanted to convey in the scene. Choice A major aspect in the writing The Walking Dead was the concept of death, whether for the player or non-player characters. Telltale itself was formed from many former LucasArts employees, who had previously written games where the player could not die. As such, they introduced situations where