Art style tests

So I think its safe to say we are not looking for a realistic art style. 

Some inspiration for level design and art style:

Some test results:

Most of these efforts are normal image fx done in a frag shader. Except for the last one which is done by the help of a compute shader.
The main idea was to sample a grid of pixels and then for x Radius we color the pixels around these to be the same color. It was kind of the first step to what follows. the idea was then to "smear" the dots and get a more painting like vibe. 
That resulted more in a low res blurred image then paint strokes...
Then i remember some earlier compute shader experiments with noise vector fields and letting pixels follow these.

Which looked like this.

The main change is to represent pixels as particles and give then some angle coming from a Perlin noise and some velocity in that direction. so you generate a bunch of these in a compute buffer send them to the compute shader where al the magic happens, and blit the result to the screen. Giving something like this

Exploring some more options: