Aha. There is a completely different problem here.
So in flappy bird, rather than the player moving, the stage actually moves around your character. Instead of the player moving right, what is really happening is that everything else is moving left. After your particles get created, they stay in the same location and don't move left with the rest of the objects when they move.
I don't think there is a way to control the particles made by the particle object to fix this. However, what you can do is create your own particles with sprite objects that have the fade and bullet behavior. Every X seconds, create the sprite object at origin x, y, set bullet angle of motion to random(a-n,a+n) where a is the target angle and n is the variance, set fade time and duration, bullet speed, ect. Then you put these sprite object "particles" in the same family as the rest of the level obstacle objects, and they will move along with the rest of the stage.