Stephen (Step) Lockyer is a UK-based creator and founder of Enigmailed, a company known for its unique and innovative puzzle experiences. Past releases include a mystery-filled furniture catalogue, a Heist mission that challenges players to learn coding, and book nook escape rooms that you build and solve. In this interview, Step talks about his background in teaching, turning seemingly normal objects on their head, and how he manages so many projects at once. He also gives some cryptic clues about lots of his upcoming projects!
(Meet Your Maker is an interview series featuring creators of puzzle and mystery games and experiences from across the globe. We aim to shine a spotlight on both established creators and those who are just setting out on their journey. Stay tuned for more interviews coming soon.)
Who is Step Lockyer?
I am a baby-faced 50-year-old who lives in outer London, UK. I have four teenage children and a wonderful partner whom I am marrying this October (yes, our wedding rings have puzzles in them). I love reading and watching films, running, walking and the great outdoors. I’m happiest in my hammock in the woods. I’d appear an extrovert, but actually get a lot of calm from being on my own. This is useful as I am working on Enigmailed full-time this year, alongside an incredibly truculent co-worker (cat) called Saffie, who does very little work when she is awake.
Do you remember what first ignited your passion for puzzles?
I can remember getting an Usborne puzzle book when I was younger. I couldn’t tell you the title, but I can recall an Aztec theme. I spent all of Christmas evening working my way through it. I also started a detective agency when I was about six or seven, again inspired by an Usborne book. My Mum came into my room at 3 am, asking why my light was on. I replied that, obviously, I was taking fingerprints.
How did you transition from playing puzzles to creating them?
I have had quite a few educational books published and then moved over to self-publishing – the turnaround was faster and the money much better. The move to publishing my own puzzle books happened around 2019, and it grew from there. I went part-time in 2023 and full-time this year.
What is the story of Enigmailed so far?
I started with Escapages, a joint venture with my friend Matt Rowe. We did some work as a partnership, notably Flatpak, an original idea I had, which I thought would be fun to work on together. Matt’s life is extraordinarily busy, however, and this also coincided with my disenfranchisement at the state of autonomy and creativity in teaching, so I started Enigmailed Puzzles to scratch that creative itch. It has grown from there!
With Enigmailed, I wanted this to be distinctly different – sometimes more playful, other times more dark, but created by me. I enjoy creating puzzles that are either original or are games hidden in plain sight.
Where do your ideas come from?
Thinking about this, it relates a lot to the improv prompt of ‘what if?’ – if you look back at some of my projects, you can probably see these questions! What if the IKEA catalogue was actually filled with puzzles? What if a book nook could be played as an escape room? What if overlaying tracing paper on maps could expose secret messages? I appreciate that I am extremely privileged to be able to fully explore my ‘what if’ questions! I pinch myself daily.
What does your creative process look like?
I would say I have seven skills as an adult, and one of them is the ability to join two things together really effectively (sidenote: 100 years ago, almost all patents were for inventions – literally new things. In 2023, almost all patents were innovations; two or more inventions merged together).
The ideas come fully formed. I love that Disney expression of Imagineering – coming up with something and then engineering how to make it work. Added to that, I read about the IKEA methodology of product design, which is essentially ‘design a X for £X, which will retail for £X, and needs to fit into this space X by X by X.’ Restriction breeds creativity.
Try this exercise:
- Create a puzzle.
- Create a puzzle in a zoo.
- Create a puzzle in a zoo where the monkeys have escaped.
Which one makes you start getting creative straight away? Mine is number 3. It limits options, honing your focus.
One activity we used to do when I taught Graphic Design in Secondary School IT was to use the Random article generator on Wikipedia to select a Band name, then an album title, and the students had to create the cover image. Enormous fun, and it built focus.
For each Kickstarter project, I think really carefully about both shipping and pricing ladders. Some projects have been designed backwards to reduce the shipping burden. I pack every single order myself; it takes time and isn’t perfect, but the prices I have been quoted for shipping were painful.
Regarding pricing ladders, I work carefully to ensure that I can make my games as accessible as possible, and will try to offer a low-cost version if ever possible. If you look back, you’ll see I offer a base model, an enhanced model and a collector edition whenever possible.
You’ve been teaching for more than 25 years. Are puzzles a tool that you use in an educational setting?
Absolutely. As a teacher, I’ve been making puzzles and questions for years. Challenges aid retention, so I use them a LOT. I think the sense of curiosity and discovery is so embedded in my pedagogy that it’s hard to discern any distinction between them. In my classes, we call this a learning itch – the insatiable desire to work something out or solve something. Never accept face value. Question everything. Ask why relentlessly. I aim to create students who are relentlessly curious about the world; who wants to grow up simply accepting everything?!
Does your existing skill set inform the development of your games, or do you use each new project as an educational opportunity?
I have a low boredom threshold. I really try to avoid doing the same puzzle wherever possible. One subscriber to my chocolate bars recognised this once, noting that in over 100 puzzles across the series, no puzzle had been repeated!
This all stems from my terrible fear of being unoriginal. I really want people to see Enigmailed projects and go, ‘I’ve never seen that before’ – this is my dream response. I could go the more conventional route and pump out ‘Escape Room In A Box’ games, but why would I want to?
You have a seemingly infinite slate of projects in the works. How do you balance all of these ideas and choose where to focus next?
I use a custom-made piece of software called ProjectDial, which works brilliantly for me – I have a dashboard of all my projects on one screen, and I can click on any of them and see the next task. It lets me ‘push’ the next steps onto my weekly task sheet.
As soon as a project is fully fleshed out, I’ll make a prelaunch page for it on Kickstarter and start seeking followers. This is a great indicator of what the market actually wants. Say I launched two projects in prelaunch pages, and six months later, one has 30 followers, and the other has 200. It gives a very clear indication of what I should be focusing on! I’d like to thank Nick Bentley for his advice on refining this process.
It does also highlight project nurseries. I came up with a party game called Rolling News, and while it has legs, I can’t currently make it work. If I ever solve the problematic mechanic, it’ll already have a few followers.
What inspired the Clues in Sprues series?
I was talking to my friend whose husband is heavily into Warhammer. We came up with a birthday card idea of a classic Warhammer phrase (“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”), which I turned into a sprue (a printed plastic frame). Warhammer are incredibly protective of its IP, so I couldn’t produce anything commercially with what I’d made.
He loved it, and it made me think that I had never seen a puzzle game using sprues before. It was originally an Advent game, and I pimped it slightly as my schedule changed, so it’s lovely to revisit the Christmas theme once more with Seasonal Sprues.
Seasonal Clues in Sprues is currently live on Kickstarter. Who might this game appeal to?
I’d hope both people who played the original Clues In Sprues game, which came out recently, as well as people who want yet another Advent-based puzzle game. In all honesty, although I’m pitching it as an Advent game (24 puzzles), I think it probably suits the glorious netherworld of Betwixtmas, an unofficial holiday period in the UK where we basically go on long walks, eat random food and try to work out whether the bins need to go out tomorrow or not. It’s my favourite time of year!
How do you approach designing 3D-printed puzzles?
It is a challenge, as it isn’t often that you are having to design in three dimensions for a puzzle.
It begins with a word list and consideration for how you might disguise those words. Some words leap out in their playfulness, while others appear stubborn and not open to manipulation (as an example, for a wedding puzzle I’m making, the last puzzle took about a week of pondering, for a really simple word).
I sketch out all of the possible puzzles, then use either a graphics program or the 3D design program to create them. One comment from a would-be backer about how much waste there would be after making the puzzles really made me focus on the sprues as part of the puzzle experience, and I have put a lot of effort into incorporating the frames into the puzzles. I actually spent the time cutting out all the puzzles, weighing them and worked out I was down to just 15% wastage (and even that I’m working on).
Once all the puzzles are laid out, I then add Sprutes – little connecting pipes to join everything together. This takes a long time, but does make the overall structure stronger. Making puzzles is solving puzzles – I’m really good friends with Martin Raynsford, and we often will send each other sections of a puzzle that we are trying to solve!
Any advice for puzzle makers who are just starting their journey?
Here is a simple exercise to prompt some initial puzzle design – disguise the numbers from ONE to TEN, each in a different way. One could be hidden in a sentence, as a misspelling. Another could be a hand on a circle, nudging people to think of clock faces. Roman numerals could be another. Disguising numbers is a good way of trying to mentally add gates to something. The next stage would be to add colours to each of these puzzles. Finally, create an order in some way of four colours – I’ve seen these as four posters in a line, coloured pencils in a box, hats on a hook, coloured nails. There – you’ve just created your own colour padlock puzzle (with six red herrings).
I’d look at Flatpak as a case study. I made the first 60 puzzles free to play as a daily puzzle. I loved Kickstarter and wanted to run a campaign there, so I made a page, mockups and everything. When we pressed launch on the ‘Flatpak’ campaign, I had not spent a single penny.
I do think that the environment has changed in the past eight years. People are now expecting a more ‘market-ready’ product, and I think maybe Kickstarter has lost some of its ‘bootstrapped’ culture, and I think some of that is failed Kickstarters. It puts people off, so they are less willing to take a risk on products which don’t seem ready. I think upon reflection that I am just as guilty of this – I use Kickstarter as a launchpad rather than seed funding now.
I’m about 15 campaigns in and still don’t have a ‘Project We Love’ badge. It’s really weak to admit it, but every time I make another original game that I’ve never seen before, I think “what do they WANT from me?!”
What is the game you are most proud of and why?
There are probably two I am most, most proud of, both very different. Undeliverable is a set of five cards, and some of the puzzles are *chef’s Kiss* in my humble opinion. The other is Nightjar, which was a limited run of 100 games, all inside a Marmite Jar. It honestly took hours to make each one, and the smell didn’t leave the house for a while. Here’s the weird thing – you can get Undeliverable for £10, and Nightjar last sold for £300 in a charity auction.
If someone hasn’t played any of your games, which would you recommend they start with?
I’d break you in gently with Clues in Sprues, use Undeliverable as an entry to the wordplay game, Cover Blown is a cracking logic puzzle game, Full Deck is a great trilogy for the readers, and Sjandiva is, I think, our funniest product; I genuinely loved writing that book! Incointation is whimsical, Give Me A Reason is honestly heartbreaking (especially when you complete it – I think it has the best Aha moment I’ve made), and Notable Remains takes over your table (the title was a gag- a game so big that no table remains).
Do you get a chance to play puzzle games from other creators?
I do play puzzle games. Like any creator, I used to not, for fear of inadvertent idea theft, but I’ve moved past that now – there are only so many ways to disguise a word or clue! I really love the History Mysteries – genuinely fun to play, with some clever puzzles too. Lost in the Shuffle is another one I loved – more games should be that portable; you can play it in the pub. I loved the Meta puzzle book from Pedja Banovic – I had the idea for Sjandiva years ago, but this book really helped me work out how I could realise it. We also played the Taskmaster Advent game last year, and loved it. We are enormous Taskmaster fans, so the fact that the game was good too really helped!
Finally, can you tease any of your upcoming projects?
I currently have a two-year runway of projects, all in various stages of development! Personal highlights include:
M██████ – a table-sized blueprint of something, with information around it – this will be a group solve.
The ██████ ████ – A very specific puzzle book for parents and adults, inspired by Chase Roberts. I’m fairly sure it will divide opinion, but I can’t shake the idea from my head, and initial sketches are really exciting!
███████ ███ – This will be an open-air Escape Room game using an existing environment. I have permission to do it, and am in the process of building the puzzles for it. Think Escape Room game but with trainers!
████ █████ – Wildly ambitious puzzle-only console (think Game Boy for puzzles), being created by a team of highly skilled programmers and designers, and me.
███████ █████ – A multi-chapter puzzle narrative, with a theme of finding your lost love in a dystopian future. Zombies + Miracle Mile + Puzzles.
████ ████ 2028. Hardback. Enough said.
I am a notebook obsessive, and was looking at my diary from 2020, and it was a JOY to see some of my projects, as brief sketches, words and phrases, that have come to fruition. It’s far easier to join the dots looking backwards!
Thank you!
A huge thanks to Step for agreeing to this interview – I hope you’ve found his answers as insightful as I did. I’m personally in awe of his ability to generate so many fun and unique ideas for puzzle projects. He has created so many games that we couldn’t possibly touch on them all in this interview, but we did our best to cover as much as possible. If you’d like to check out the full Enigmailed catalogue, you can do so by clicking here.
Seasonal Clues in Sprues is currently live on Kickstarter, and you can find all the information you need on that by visiting the campaign page:
Find Step/Enigmailed online
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