How to Fix GameMaker Cutscene Text Stuck When the Game Is Paused

A GameMaker cutscene that freezes after pausing was deactivated along with everything else. Keeping its controller active fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Keep the controller active

If you pause with instance_deactivate_all(true), re-activate the cutscene controller with instance_activate_object(obj_cutscene), or never deactivate it in the first place.

2. Pause by flag, not deactivation

Use a global pause flag that gameplay objects check at the top of their Step, while the cutscene controller ignores it, so cinematic logic keeps running while gameplay is frozen.

3. Gate gameplay input separately

Stop gameplay reading input during the cutscene with a flag rather than deactivating instances, so the cutscene's own advance input still reaches its controller.

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 GameMaker 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.