How to Fix a Puzzle Hint Suggesting a Move That Does Nothing

A hint must show a move that works. If your hint highlights swaps that clear nothing, the search returns candidates without validating them. Reuse the same match detector the game uses to verify each candidate.

How to fix it

1. Enumerate candidate swaps

Walk the board and consider swapping each tile with its right and down neighbor. These cover all adjacent pairs without duplicates.

2. Validate with the real detector

For each candidate, apply the swap to a scratch grid and run the actual match-detection routine. Keep only swaps that yield a run of three or more.

3. Return and highlight a verified move

Surface the first validated swap as the hint and animate it. If no candidate validates, the board is dead, so trigger your reshuffle instead of showing a bad hint.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.