Moving Platforms are Incredibly Discourging But Progress Pushes Forward Pleasingly

I have spent the past days adjusting to school again and solving the most sinister problem I have yet to face on my current project; moving platforms. These are infuriating little critters. After hours of playing around with different systems and variables, they are still incredibly broken. And this is not even my solution I am trying to get to work; this moving platform code is from the engine I am using. However, there is an issue stopping them from working in my code that is not present in the original engine. Something is quite clearly wrong and it is probably obvious. In situations like this I tend to over think, which is both fortune and misfortune.

Reasonably, I have moved on for now and have worked on implementing other systems. This has been an incredibly smooth experience so far, for which I am thankful. Most of the work between now and my last post was accomplished today. I am going to go through all the changes in bullet point form to please my incredibly lazy soul.

• The art style has been changed. Instead of rendering sprites that are 8x8 pixels, I have realized that this project is going to require less sprite work than I was originally anticipating, and thus I have moved on to 32x32 sprites. The added fidelity is both a blessing and curse. It allows for more detail and more visual opportunities but makes sprite creation a longer process and makes animation even more hell-ish.
• With the change of art style, I have removed the previous character sprites and replaced them with a placeholder mask for the time being. I am considering creating a non-human for the main playable character. Preferably something that is easy to animate.
• Those collectable diamonds are new and play a major role in the overall game design. They are extremely polished already too; collecting one is an incredible visual and aural experience.
• The '0' at the top is the current score and is the beginning of the hud I am going to implement. That score is the most important element of the entire game.

I also tried to add some combat in there, but it was a pretty awful and lazy attempt. The next thing I am going to do is give this another try. With the combat squared away, I will then start to focus on setting up the rest of the important game systems and after that, guess what, it is time to start creating a crap ton of content.