Quick answer: Test tutorials by systematically breaking the expected sequence at every step. Try performing actions out of order, skipping steps, dying mid-tutorial, opening menus, and disconnecting. Map the tutorial as a state machine and verify every transition, including the ones players are not supposed to take.
Tutorials are the highest-stakes part of your game from a retention perspective. A bug in hour ten is frustrating. A bug in minute two is a refund. Yet tutorials are often the least-tested feature because they seem simple — the player just follows instructions, right? In practice, players do everything except follow instructions, and tutorial code is typically a tangled web of one-off state management that breaks in spectacular ways.
Mapping the Tutorial State Machine
Before you test, you need to understand exactly what the tutorial does. Most tutorials are implicit state machines: step 1 leads to step 2 leads to step 3. But the transitions between steps are where bugs hide. Document every step, what triggers the transition to the next step, and what game state each step assumes.
For each step, write down: What is the player told to do? What input is the game waiting for? What happens if the player provides different input? What game state changes when the step completes (variables set, items granted, abilities unlocked, areas opened)?
This documentation is your test plan. Every assumption in the “what if” column is a test case. If the tutorial says “press A to jump” and waits for a jump input, your test cases include: pressing every other button, opening the pause menu, dying before jumping, walking away from the tutorial trigger area, and alt-tabbing out of the game.
Testing for Sequence Breaks
A sequence break occurs when a player performs a future tutorial action before being told to. For example, the tutorial plans to teach crafting in step 5, but the player opens the crafting menu during step 2. If the tutorial checks for “player crafted an item” as the completion trigger for step 5, the player may accidentally skip steps 3 and 4.
The most reliable way to test for sequence breaks is to try every available action at every step. This is tedious but effective. At step 1, try every button, every menu, every interactable object. Move to step 2 and do it again. Automated input fuzzing can help here — write a script that sends random inputs during each tutorial step and check whether the tutorial state machine ever reaches an invalid state.
Common sequence break scenarios to test explicitly:
- Collecting items early — If the tutorial plans to give the player a sword, can they find one in the world first?
- Entering areas early — Can the player reach the area used in step 5 by jumping over a wall during step 1?
- Using abilities before they’re taught — If the player already knows the controls from a previous playthrough, they may use abilities the tutorial hasn’t introduced yet.
- Completing objectives out of order — If steps 3 and 4 are “talk to the blacksmith” and “talk to the merchant,” what happens if you talk to the merchant first?
Testing Death, Disconnection, and Interruption
Players die during tutorials. They lose internet connection during tutorials. They close the game and come back three weeks later during tutorials. Each of these scenarios is a potential source of softlocks and state corruption.
Death during tutorials. At every step, find a way to die (or kill the player character through debug tools). Verify that the tutorial state is correctly restored after respawn. A common bug is the tutorial advancing to the next step on death because the death event triggers the same code path as the completion event.
Save and reload mid-tutorial. Save the game at every tutorial step, close the application, and reload. Does the tutorial resume at the correct step? Are all visual elements (highlights, arrows, popup text) restored? Does the game state match what the tutorial expects? A frequent bug is that the tutorial serializes its step number but not the intermediate state changes, so step 3 loads correctly but the items granted in step 2 are missing.
Alt-tab and background. Switch away from the game during a timed tutorial event. Minimize during a cutscene. On mobile, receive a phone call during the tutorial. These interruptions can desync timers, pause states, and input handlers. The tutorial may resume in a state where it is waiting for input that was consumed by the OS while the game was backgrounded.
Testing the Skip Button
If your tutorial is skippable, the skip function is one of the most bug-prone features in your game. Skipping must instantaneously set up all the game state that the tutorial would have gradually established: grant all tutorial items, unlock all tutorial abilities, set all tutorial flags, position the player in the post-tutorial location, and dismiss all tutorial UI elements.
Test skipping at every single step, not just the beginning. A skip from step 1 and a skip from step 7 may need to initialize different amounts of state. If the skip function only handles “skip from the beginning,” skipping from step 7 will double-grant items or set flags that are already set, potentially causing inventory overflow or broken quest states.
Also test what happens when a player skips the tutorial, plays for a while, then starts a new game. Does the tutorial properly reset? Are all the skip-granted items and flags cleared? New-game state initialization is often tested in isolation but not after a skip-then-restart sequence.
First-Time User Experience Testing
Beyond technical bugs, test the tutorial for usability with people who have never seen your game. Give a fresh build to someone unfamiliar with the project and watch them play without helping. Note every moment they hesitate, every instruction they misunderstand, and every time they try something the tutorial did not anticipate.
This kind of testing reveals a category of bugs that automated testing cannot: design bugs. The tutorial says “use the grapple point” but the player does not know what a grapple point looks like. The tutorial says “open your inventory” but the player presses the wrong key because the key binding was never shown. These are not code defects, but they produce the same outcome as code defects — a confused player who may not come back.
Record these sessions (with permission) and review them as a team. The patterns you see will inform both bug fixes and design improvements. If three out of five testers get stuck at the same point, that point needs to change regardless of whether the code is technically working correctly.
Break the sequence, kill the player, skip at every step, then watch someone new try it.