Strategy for rendering the same sprites many times without slowing down FPS
<p>I am trying to generate a game involving a labyrinth, generated at random for each level. I am designing this game for android and am using openGL 1.</p>

<p>FPS is around 60 when I am running fairly small labyrinths, but when I start to go high in numbers the FPS drops down to 30's-40's.
I draw each wall as a separate sprite (using a standard spriteBatcher I got off the internet, and the same Texture) and FPS drops when the number of sprites is about 500 or more. FPS doesn't seem to go further down when I got up to 3000 sprites, but it does go back up to ~60 when I zoom in.
So I figured that the number of sprites that have to be displayed is the reason for the slowdown.</p>

<p>My initial strategy was to draw the labyrinth upon initiation, and then render it as one sprite. However, I will be making in-game changes to the labyrinth occasionally, so this drawing will be invoked during game-time, and has to be fairly fast.
I tried grabbing the pixels off the display and also tried to draw the labyrinth using Canvas in the background but both methods take about 1 full second.</p>

<p>I will appreciate any idea on how to get around this, and any thought on why the game slows down if my hypothesis is wrong.</p>

<p>Thank you</p>

<p>Disclaimer - I am not a very experienced programmer.</p>