The game designer and writer Harrison G. Pink commented that the in-game decisions were not meant to be good because there couldn't be an optimal play-through. Clementine made those decisions even more difficult, since her presence forces the player to consider protecting her on another level. "It gets way more blurred when you involve Clementine," Pink said. "You have these decisions that are probably the right decisions for the group--she's watching, but then maybe she needs to understand this, but I might scare her because she'll think I'm a crazy person. There's no wrong choice, if you can justify it and it feels properly motivated to you, it's a valid choice." With the game's second season, Clementine becomes the playable character, a choice that allowed them to continue the themes of the first season while introducing new characters and situations for the second. Telltale was first challenged to try to make Clementine feel like the character that the player, through making decisions as Lee, had groomed. One method this was resolved by was to create the first scenario of the game to put the player in control of Clementine's actions that have disastrous results (the death of one character and being separated from another) as to make the player felt as if they had made those choices and separating them from familiar characters. Further, they had to consider how to present Clementine as a character that could make substantial changes on the world and characters around her despite being a child. Telltale had intended for "" to be their final game featuring Clementine. As they were in the midst of developing and releasing this season, the studio suffered from a major financial crisis, forcing them to lay off nearly all of their staff and shutter existing projects. On this news, Robert Kirkman and others at Skybound Entertainment considered how they could finish the game, as Kirkman felt it was necessary to complete Clementine's story. Skybound brought in a portion of the former Telltale staff that had been working on "The Final Season" to complete the remaining episodes. Clementine is introduced when Lee Everett takes shelter in her suburban home in Georgia to find refuge from zombies (referred to in-universe as walkers). She is revealed to be hiding from the walkers alone in a tree house as her parents had left for Savannah some time before the apocalypse. Lee offers to take and protect Clementine, hoping that they will be able to find her parents. They eventually join a small group of survivors, which include Kenny, his wife Katjaa and his son Kenny "Duck" Jr.