I got a very basic particle system in place right now, but for some reason its showing up in the editor but disappears when I play the game. As a test I tried one of Unreals own particle system and it works just fine.
You probably shouldn't try to do that in the shader. If you did, you'd need a separate subtree of your material dedicated to each explosion, which would increase the number of instructions for every pixel each time that you added a new explosion. The Unreal way is to add a particle system and dynamic light for each little…