Starting off with another minor detour, I scripted a collective lifespan (for deletion) into my bullets. This solved my first performance concern with my shooter game.

Adding to the above, another simple task I did was setting a default value for the enemy's Health. Beneath this sentence is a menu for all the togglables in a variable, all of which I am confident will be comprehensible after a few weeks (hopefully).

Onto the more cut-and-dry content, I introduce you to the Niagara System - UE5's own visual effects system designed to be non-programmer-friendly. There are several starting point templates one can create a Niagara file from. My pick for the enemy damage effect was the 2D circular particle splash effect.

If you want the particles to be 3D, one can delete the sprite renderer and replace it with a mesh renderer instead. Doing so allows creators to select which 3D mesh that spawns in a cluster per script trigger.

I simply generate a Spawn System node, link my enemy NPC data nodes to the logical slots and the Niagara blood-per-damage system is linked to said NPC.

In what I presume to be modern action gaming, gore and blood is the golden standard for a believably entertaining experience in any media that involves violence - be it animation or video game. That and it is a solid indicator of player progression towards murdering poor saps along your grissly path.

You have the particle splattering but not the blood spilling. Changing the milky Niagara particles is a trivial matter; simply go to the Details tab and add an Override Material which will automatically replace the default grey static mesh from before.

And woe to the enemy who sheds bright blood from our violence!

My final action today was to also make MY character bleed to compensate for my nonexistent health bar widget. Tweaks to the particle-animation sequence were made so the attack animation script runs AFTER the player takes damage from an enemy, ensuring they do not appear to hurt the player out of no visible cause.

And you might have noticed an event loop at the left top of the Event Graph below. That loop ensures the enemy NPC will continuously attack as long as the condition of a player within its collision capsule is met.