Most games train you to find objects. Spot the hidden mushroom. Collect the coin. Shoot the target. Aleksandr Gorbunov's game, Ku, does the opposite. It asks you to find the emptiness.
Ku is a mobile wellness game built around a single, disorienting idea: the space between objects is more interesting than the objects themselves. You look at a photorealistic scene — two hands reaching toward each other, trees standing in fog, ancient arches against blue sky — and instead of paying attention to what's there, you learn to see what's not. The gaps. The voids. The negative shapes that your brain has been filtering out your entire life.
It's a perceptual inversion, and it's harder than it sounds.
The Mechanic
Each level presents a photorealistic image. Between the objects lie voids — negative spaces with distinct shapes. At the bottom of the screen, contour cards show the outlines of these voids. The player's job is to match each card to its corresponding void in the scene.
When you find a match, the void doesn't just highlight. It consumes itself — particles fly toward the camera, a color wave washes across the screen, and a note sounds, climbing through three octaves across the level, building a progression that feels less like a sound effect and more like a meditation bell counting your breaths.
By the time you've found all the voids, the scene is fully revealed, the music has ascended, and you've spent several minutes doing something no other game asks of you: paying deep, sustained attention to absence.
The Person
Aleksandr is a student at MIPT — one of Russia's top science universities — and simultaneously the sole founder of SPS, an indie studio focused on wellness games. Game design, programming, level creation, business planning — all one person.
What makes it viable is an AI-powered production pipeline. Each level starts as an AI-generated photorealistic scene, gets segmented using Meta's Segment Anything Model, then goes through a series of extraction and assembly steps — partly automated, partly manual. The one irreducibly human step is deciding how to divide the space between objects into individual voids. Topology is a design decision, not an algorithmic one.
The entire pipeline — from concept to playable link — can execute in a single working session. For a solo developer targeting 35 levels, this is the difference between a viable project and an impossible one.
The Philosophy
The mechanics come from a deliberate philosophical position about attention. Should the player find existing voids or create them by removing clutter? Finding — it's closer to mindfulness practice. Should the game dictate order? No — the game waits, it never commands. Should mistakes be punished? Never — anxiety kills relaxation, and relaxation is the product.
The reference point isn't other puzzle games. It's apps like Loóna — a wellness product built by the MSQRD team (acquired by Facebook), which Aleksandr studied in forensic detail: founders, funding, UX methodology, churn patterns. He mapped the competitive landscape not to copy it but to understand where Ku sits: not a sleep app, not a meditation app, but something without a category yet — a perceptual training tool disguised as a game.
The Hard Parts
This isn't a success story yet. It's a building-in-public story.
The biggest enemy has been what Aleksandr's mentor called “perfectionism as procrastination” — the inability to declare a version good enough. Hands that looked photorealistic were dismissed as not photorealistic enough. Mechanics that worked were questioned before they could be tested. The antidote was blunt: stop polishing, start shipping. Build 10 levels. Put it on itch.io. Send it to 10 people. Collect feedback from humans, not from internal monologue.
What This Might Mean
There's a broader thesis here. Aleksandr's work on AI-native micro-studios — presented at MIPT's scientific conference — argues that a single person with AI infrastructure can produce work that previously required a team. Not because AI replaces human judgment, but because it compresses the execution of that judgment into a viable timeline.
Whether Ku works commercially is an open question. The game isn't released yet. The perceptual mechanic — asking people to look at nothing — might be too counterintuitive for a mass audience. But the pipeline works, the philosophy is coherent, the first levels are beautiful, and the experiment is already worth watching.
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Aleksandr Gorbunov is a physics student at MIPT and the founder of SPS. Ku is in active development.