This engine can feel backwards sometimes. The things I did to optimize with the player/co-op HUD objects apparently had the opposite effect. I was enlightened by Beenbaba on how to resolve this, this update mainly concerns that. I've also removed the Flash Shield icons from the player HUDs and am now displaying that information directly on the player(s). Further reducing the object count and keeping important information more in the player's view as opposed to the corner of the screen/frame.

I've alleviated the resources used on redundant link condition checks and such which happen every frame. I've also combined separate graphics/sheets into the same images so the game is caching less total unique image files.