Nice work, glad to see another person learning. Loading and stroing subrotuines are generally easy to do, but heres a little idea. Im 99% sure that a nop or 00000000 is the EXACT SAME as the byte 00 so that means instead of ori'n (or anddi or addiu works too) you can just load the byte ontot the data.....

lb t1, $00(tX)

Nice work also to increment health find a float and use addiu to add the data to the pointer or fnc when hit.