What causes screen shake breaking with time scale?

Screen shake is driven by scaled delta time, so it freezes when paused (time scale zero) or slows in slow motion, behaving inconsistently with the intended effect.

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 Screen Shake Breaking on Pause or Slow Motion

Quick answer: Drive screen shake with unscaled time where it should run regardless of time scale, or deliberately scale it with gameplay time where that is intended, consistently.

Screen shake breaking on pause is a scaled-time issue. Choosing the right time source fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Decide the time source

Decide whether shake should continue during pause and slow motion (use unscaled time) or slow with the game (use scaled time). Mixing them, or using scaled time unintentionally, causes the broken behavior.

2. Use unscaled time for UI-level shake

Camera or UI feedback that should play regardless of time scale must use unscaled delta time, so it does not freeze when the game pauses or crawl in slow motion.

3. Restore cleanly

Make sure shake offsets are reset when it ends or when the game pauses, so a shake interrupted by a pause does not leave the camera offset or resume incorrectly.

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.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.