I hate to admit, but I did rip the art from an online sprite database. Being I little concerned with infringing on copyrights, I did look up the maker of the game, and the Japanese business no longer exists. I was hoping to get in contact with someone, just to ask if it was OK to use these images.
As for the uphill, downhill challenge, I’ve been reading around on different approaches. I could still rely on the idea of the player overlapping the ground, but unfortunately I don’t know where the overlap occurs. I could just keep positioning the player to be a few pixels above the ground, until it no longer overlaps. Also I need to move the ground sprites at a certain x,y speed that matches the vx of the player.
This type of programming would certainly make for an interesting stream for the team.