With my experience, if you're going to use a sprite contentiously through the game, just hide it. For allot of my app games, I load and create everything, from the UI to obstacles, player, etc and either hide or move them off-screen until I need them.
From my own experience, when you set a sprite off-screen or it's hidden, AppGameKit won't render it. You can have hundreds of sprites created, but if they're hidden or off-screen there is no performance hit. This is from my own trial/error. I don't know the behind the scenes specifics.
Side Note: Stop with the bashing/attacks, keep your personal quips at the door.
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