You were on the right track there. The techniques that I was suggesting would have eventually led us to the fact that the message didn’t contain a “distance” variable. By applying these techniques (printing variables and checking the console) you will be much better equipped to deal with these errors in the future. Good luck!
As for your particles not showing, I found this thread here, maybe this helps:
Were you able to fix this? Have you tried putting the particlefx.play in the first line of your init function?