What causes a tutorial prompt not clearing when the player skips ahead?

Each step shows its prompt but relies on the next step to hide the previous one, so when a player skips several steps at once the intermediate prompts are never explicitly cleared and stack or linger.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix a Tutorial Prompt Not Clearing When the Player Skips Ahead

Quick answer: Clear any active prompt at the start of every step transition, regardless of how many steps were skipped, so only the current step's prompt is visible.

When a player jumps ahead and an old instruction stays on screen, they follow the wrong prompt. The issue is prompts that hide only via the immediately-next step. Clear all prompts on every transition so multi-step skips do not leave residue.

How to fix it

1. Clear prompts on every transition

At the start of each step change, remove any currently shown prompt before showing the new one, rather than relying on the previous step to clean up after itself.

2. Drive prompts from current step only

Render the visible prompt purely from the active step ID. If the prompt is a function of current step, skipping steps cannot leave an orphan from a skipped one.

3. Handle multi-step jumps

When the player skips several steps at once, run the same clear-then-show path, so no intermediate step's prompt is left behind because its hide code never ran.

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 HTML5 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.

A crash you can name from its stack trace is a crash you can usually fix in minutes.