The S2 Engine: building a better Hitbox
The S2 Engine is a leverless controller layout intended to allow you to play a wider variety of games with arcade style controls. A revision of the S2 Drive, which was designed with retro style games in mind, it combines WASD style directional controls with the spacebar style jump button popularized by the Hitbox.
The goal here was to keep a “home row” position for your hands, with the consideration that it's much faster and more comfortable to close your fingers than to extend them.
Two thumb buttons allow easy access to the trigger buttons, with oversized pinky buttons for auxiliary functions. This has the advantage of allowing both thumbs to access the jump button, with the thumb buttons replacing the hard to reach pinky column, making it easier to hit or hold with other buttons.
The layout gives you the advantages of a regular leverless layout for fighting games, with the benefit of more intuitive navigation in menus, 2D action games and even 3D space. Combined with a remappable controller firmware, it allows a wider range of applications than both traditional leverless and arcade stick layouts.
I have two recommended button mappings, one more in line with the traditional fightstick layout, and a more universal one suited to all kinds of games.
The first remaps the third column from R1 and R2 to both shoulder buttons, with L1 on the top and R1 on the bottom. This allows easier navigation through menu tabs, instead of the reversed left and right positions of the shoulder buttons on a traditional layout.
The second puts most of the face buttons on the same row, aligning them in a mirrored WASD position on the other side of the buttons, with the shoulder buttons flanking them. Square, cross, and circle are on the bottom row, with triangle above the cross button, and L1 and R1 to the side of the triangle button. Games commonly focus their main actions on the square, cross and circle buttons, so this allows you to access most of them at the same time without finger movement. The positioning of the L1 and R1 buttons allow more intuitive menu navigation, and directional actions.
Both trigger buttons are positioned on the thumb buttons to the side of the large jump button, with the up button duplicated in the WASD cluster, and the L3 and R3 flank the direction and action buttons.
LAYOUT DEMONSTRATIONS
Here's some example layouts as a demonstration.
For Street Fighter 6 this allows you to play with both classic and modern controls. On classic you get the usual 6 button layout on top, with the shortcuts for Drive Parry, Drive Impact or throw on the thumb or pinky buttons. You can even forego one of the up buttons to turn either into another macro. Personally, I use the right pinky for Drive Impact and the right thumb for parry, with throw and character specific functions on the remaining two.
On Modern this layout makes it easier to use the assist feature by mapping it to a thumb button, allowing the rest of your fingers to rest on top with the light, medium and heavy buttons, with some flexibility on where you'd like the special and shortcut buttons to be.
For Guilty Gear Strive I like to map the thumb buttons to dash and roman cancel, to get easy drift RC. I always found it hard to integrate the dash button in the main six button cluster, and this mimics the natural action of left trigger right trigger that I'm used to on controller.
For games with a block button the thumb buttons are a lifesaver. In Mortal Kombat, the top buttons handle the four attacks, throw and stance flip, while the thumb buttons allow me to hold block and call assists. MK always felt like it didn't have a good solution on a standard arcade layout. Either the attack buttons get stuck in the middle, or shoved to one side with the others requiring you to stretch to use all of them.
In Soulcalibur I keep the block button in the main cluster since I default to using the button combos instead of shortcuts, but I do like keeping the thumb buttons ready for stance macros and easy supers.
In Tekken 8 I use the the top 6 buttons for the standard 4 attacks and multibuttons shortcuts, with Rage on the thumb button, Heat on the right pinky and the left pinky for awkward button combinations.
How about something less conventional? Here's Gundam Versus. Typically you play this on an arcade stick since it only uses 8 directionals and a behind the back camera. The WASD cluster here makes it more natural and even lets you do moves like dashes and blocking (down to up) faster. Again, you can give up the larger UP button and use it for communication commands, or burst.
And here's Virtual-On. This makes it easier to hit the turbo modifiers and attack buttons together and perform fast jump cancels. You can even emulate the twin stick setup of the arcades with it. Which is also useful if you want to play some 8 way twin stick shooters.
If you're running GP2040CE you can even use it for 3D action games. A lot of action games don't rely on analog inputs, only differentiating between 8 directions and rarely needing to walk, and often allow you to get away with centering the camera behind the back with a button instead of messing with the right stick. Simply set the directions to the left analog stick, and set the bottom jump button to a dpad modifier so you can access those functions.
This works great in PS2 era action games like Nightshade, which requires you to quickly chain movement and attacks, or older Devil May Cry games, where it's much easier to perform precise inputs like enemy step attacks.
On my personal controllers, I've even added aux ports that allow me to plug in pedals, to go full pianist style, getting quicker reactions for shortcuts like Drive Impact, or adding modifiers to control the camera.
And of course, since it was designed with retro games in mind it works great for that, easily adapting to the six button layouts of the Genesis, Saturn and arcade games, and allowing you to play SNES games that rely on the shoulder buttons much easier.
HOW DO I BUILD ONE?
So how do you get this layout? For my part, I've mostly been creating prototypes for this layout by hand, with a power drill and step bit. But for my final build I went to Eternal Rival with my custom layout, and other case builders such as Jonyfraze, and AllFightSticks can also do custom layouts.
I originally finished this layout over a year ago, before Street Fighter 6, and those were kind of your only options for thumb buttons. Since then the leverless controller scene has blown up with different takes, and you've got quite a few options for something similar.
I personally like Mavercade's KeebBrawler-04MX, with its pill shaped buttons and split layout, but they also have a Keebfighter line with some similar layouts.
The Zenpad Duel has a split dual thumb button layout, and Attachon and Rush box have layouts with pinky and thumb buttons. Jonyfraze offers the 6GAWD for both leverless and fightstick builds. Hell, you could even go for something like a box style controller for Smash.
I'm less impressed with the offerings from companies like Haute42, which seem to just staple buttons onto the existing layout with no consideration for access or aesthetics, but they are an option for those looking for a cheap way to test a thumb button layout.
Whatever way you choose to go, it's undeniable that we're in an era of rapid controller innovation, with tons of different philosophies on how to build better controllers, and fresh ideas coming out all the time. The S2 Engine is what works best for me, but with so many options out there now, it'd be a waste to not experiment and find your personal favorite.