What causes a level-end time bonus going negative on slow clears?

Your time bonus is computed as a fixed allowance minus elapsed seconds without a lower bound, so a clear slower than the allowance produces a negative number that is then added to the score.

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 the Time Bonus at Level End Going Negative on Slow Clears

Quick answer: Clamp the time bonus to zero, scale it by remaining time only, and add it to the score rather than subtracting, so slow players simply earn no bonus instead of losing points.

Time bonuses reward speed, but a slow run should never punish the player by deducting score. Floor the bonus at zero and keep it additive.

How to fix it

1. Floor the bonus at zero

Compute bonus = max(0, allowanceSeconds - elapsedSeconds) * pointsPerSecond. The max(0, ...) guarantees an overtime clear yields no bonus rather than a negative one.

2. Keep the bonus additive

Add the clamped bonus to the level score; never branch into a subtraction path. Score should only go up at results time, so there is no path that can reduce it.

3. Show the running tally clearly

Animate the remaining-time value draining into score on the results screen so players understand the bonus is a reward for leftover time, not a penalty for using it.

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.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.