If you are saying there are the 24 enemies PLUS the 10 explosions onscreen then I think you made a design/programming error there because the enemies should change into the explosion sprite when they die so there's never a higher number than 24 sprites/explosions onscreen at once. Or at least I imagine that would be a good way to do it in order to reduce the amount of sprites onscreen at once. Did I get you wrong there?
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Hi, thanks for feedback!
Your analysis is right, in many games you usually recycle the enemy sprite to make an explosion, and reduce the total sprites count . But for Yo-Yo Shuriken, it wasn't possible, because when an enemy is killed, its sprite is reused to display a coin (or a bonus). The enemies always drop a coin or a bonus, because it's the only way to score points in the game.
So I had to use an extra set of hardware sprites to display the explosions :). It was more convenient because killing an enemy can now trigger more than one explosion at a time (like with the bosses).
So yes, for this game I do have up to 24 enemies (16x16 pixels) + 10 explosions sprites (32x32 pixels) on screen.