Character or Camera Relative?
A common snare that game designers can get into is creating controls that alternate between being character relative and camera relative. Because of the frustration it can cause to players, the designer needs to pick one control scheme or the other for the duration of the game and STICK WITH IT.
With a camera-relative control scheme, the controls change depending on which way the character is facing the camera. Say you are playing the survival horror game Terror Zombie Death Mansion 3, and your stalwart hero stands in a hallway.
When you press left on the analog stick, the character walks to the left. The room he enters has the camera pointing at the hero—in the opposite direction from the shot in the hallway.4
Now when you press the stick to the left, the character walks to the right—because the controls have been mapped to how the game camera sees the character, rather than from the character’s orientation. Unfortunately, thanks...