Scrolling Backgrounds and Lava Pits

I've been doing some more work on my platforming game. I'm up to 12 regular sectors now plus a bonus sector. The bonus sector is a really easy hallway with no real obstacles and a lot of easy to collect gems, but the odds of getting one are also much lower relative to the other sectors. I also have a scrolling background going behind the level now that moves at a different rate than the player. I think it gives it a cool look to have the scrolling going on whenever you run or change directions.

After play testing the game quite a bit, I decided that it was too easy to simply outrun the lava wave for long periods of time. Eventually it will catch up to you because it slowly revs up in speed, but you can still go pretty long stretches before it hits you. To up the difficulty a little without making the lava wave just impossible to outrun, I added some lava pit type obstacles to some of the new rooms I've made. These are just little animated pools of lava that the player has to jump over because touching one is an instant game over. They are pretty cool and I'm happy with how they turned out, but in some places I was having trouble with the jumping and making it over the lava pits. The jumping was a little unforgiving so I tweaked it a little to be a bit more accommodating and now players won't have quite so hard a time jumping from platform to platform.

Below we have a screenshot with one of the new lava pits and the background. Its just a dark brown background with some lighter brown spots. I'm thinking this game might eventually looks like its taking place under ground, so I made a "dirt-like" background, but it still looks weird with all my brightly colored platforms and such. Plus it's just a bad background in general. Anyway, here it is: