Trail of many sprites - a better way?

The player character in my game leaves a trail of footprints behind them when they move around, and the trail needs to stick around for the whole level, not fade away.

For the prototype I'm just doing this by spawning footprint sprites, but since this ends up with many, many sprites, I'm wondering if there's a better way to approach this when I do it "for reals."

Suggestions? Past related topics seem to only have to do with trails that fade, which is not what I want.

Thanks!

Nothing much you can do apart from maybe make sure that footprints are not spawned again upon returning to the same area. I've not seen the prototype though so have to assume this is the case.