What causes a tutorial pausing the game but not the timer?

The in-game timer is driven by unscaled or real-world time, so freezing the simulation during a tutorial popup does not stop the clock and the player loses time while reading.

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 a Tutorial That Pauses the Game but Not the In-Game Timer

Quick answer: Drive the timer from scaled game time that the pause affects, or explicitly stop and resume the timer alongside the tutorial pause.

When a tutorial pauses the action but the speedrun or level timer keeps ticking, players are penalized for reading instructions. The timer ignores your pause because it uses real time. Tie it to game time or stop it explicitly during tutorials.

How to fix it

1. Use scaled time for the timer

Drive the timer from Time.time or accumulate Time.deltaTime, which respect Time.timeScale, rather than Time.unscaledTime or a real-clock source.

2. Or stop the timer explicitly

If the timer must use real time, pause and resume it from the same code that opens and closes the tutorial, so the two stay in lockstep.

3. Audit other unscaled systems

Check that cooldowns, score multipliers, and spawn timers also pause. A tutorial that freezes the world but leaves several clocks running creates subtle unfairness.

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 Unity 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.