How to Fix Screen Shake Running During Pause Because of Unscaled Time

If pausing freezes the game but the screen still shakes, the shake uses unscaled time. Matching the time source to its purpose fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Use scaled time for gameplay shake

Drive a combat or impact shake from scaled delta time so setting the time scale to zero pauses it along with everything else.

2. Reserve unscaled time for menus

Only use unscaled time for effects that must animate during pause, such as a menu transition; do not blanket-apply it to all camera effects.

3. Separate the two systems

Keep gameplay shake and UI motion in distinct code paths with explicit time sources so a global pause does the right thing for each without surprises.

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 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.