A photo of a person turned into a shallow 3D relief, with up to 64 small red six-legged insects crawling over it, each leg placing its own feet with inverse kinematics. XiaoLei Liu's own page, in Chinese: wave the mouse to make the insects follow or avoid it, or click to scatter them.
Small Company (the page's own title is 微小共生, "Tiny Symbiosis", with the English tagline "A little closer.") is a portrait with company on it. A photograph of a young woman in a Spider-Man suit stands in the middle of a dark page, and a swarm of small red six-legged insects crawls over her face, hair and shoulders. You can move the mouse near them, click to scatter them, turn the picture a little, and change how many there are, from 1 to 64.
It is the original creator's own page, not a recreation. It was published by XiaoLei Liu (@leo_xiaolei on X, GitHub account threerocks), who says in his post, quoted in the box below, that it came "straight out of" GPT-6 Astra. The page is in Chinese, with a few English captions.
It is a toy, not a game: nothing is scored. Tripo's catalogue calls it "a procedural insect that crawls along surfaces". That is the technique, but what you get is this portrait and a crowd of insects, not one bug on a choice of objects.
How to play Small Company
- It starts by itself with 24 insects wandering. In the middle is the live scene, and on the right a panel headed 观察控制 ("Observation controls"). On a phone the panel moves below the picture.
- Mouse and picture: moving the mouse over the portrait makes the insects react according to the mode you picked. Clicking or tapping the figure scatters them for about a second and a half. Dragging turns the portrait a little; it only turns about 14 degrees left or right and a smaller amount up and down, because it is a flat relief and the back is not there. The scroll wheel zooms; the arrow keys also turn and zoom when the picture has focus. Buttons under the picture reset the view, save a PNG of the frame and go full screen.
- The panel: 昆虫数量 is the insect count, 1 to 64. 爬行速度 is crawl speed, from 0.2x to 2x. Under 与鼠标相处 ("getting along with the mouse") there are three modes: 漫游 wander (each insect goes its own way), 追随 follow (they walk toward your cursor and slow down when they reach it) and 躲避 avoid (they steer away from it). 显示落足点 ("show footholds") draws a dot at each planted foot and each knee. 暂停观察 pauses everything, and Space does the same; the round arrow restarts the swarm from its starting positions.
- The 关于作品 ("About") dialog explains the work and links to an explainer page, described below.
Controls: Move the mouse over the portrait and the insects react. Click or tap the figure to scatter them. Drag to turn the view a little, scroll to zoom. The side panel sets the insect count (1 to 64) and crawl speed, picks a mouse mode (wander, follow, avoid), shows the footholds, and pauses (Space).
Click Fullscreen above the game for the largest play area. If the game does not load, use Open in new tab to play it directly from our copy.
Why it's worth your time
What the legs do. Each insect has a red glossy body, a dark head and thorax, two antennae and six legs, and each leg has two segments with a hip and a knee. When you turn on "show footholds", you can see the mechanism: three legs lift and swing to a new foot target while the other three stay planted, then they swap, which is the alternating three-leg gait real insects use. The knee is not animated by hand; it is worked out from where the hip and the foot are, so the leg bends into place. Each foot lands on the surface of the portrait, and the body tilts to match the slope.
What the surface is. The portrait is a 892 by 1734 pixel photo laid over a smooth 3D shape. Reading the page's code, the shape is a few soft bumps for the head and one broad bump for the torso, placed by hand. The About dialog says as much: it is a relief made from the photo and estimated depth, not a 3D scan, and the sides and back were not rebuilt. So the insects climb over gentle slopes, not sharp ridges or overhangs. The claim in the post about "walking on surfaces at different heights" is true in principle, but this particular surface is quite gentle. The insects stay inside the figure's outline and steer around each other.
Performance. On a desktop Mac in a real browser window it held 60 frames per second even at 64 insects, which the page reports as 144,768 triangles in 10 draw calls; the small FPS readout under the picture shows the live figure. No sound: the page has no audio code. There were no console errors.
On a phone. In an emulated 390 by 844 screen the page is a single scrolling column with no sideways overflow. A one-finger drag on the picture turns it, a tap scatters the insects, and the sliders and mode buttons work by touch. Follow and avoid only work while a finger is on the picture, since a phone cannot hover, and there is no pinch zoom (scroll-zoom is switched off on narrow screens). Not tested on a real phone.
The person in the photo. The page does not say who she is or where the photo came from; the About text just says it uses "the portrait photo you provided". We do not know whether she is a real person, whether the image is AI-generated, or whether she agreed to the use. We mirror the page as published, and would remove the copy if the photo's owner asked.
What else is in the collection. The address is a "web-3d-pages" site with three pages. The main one is this interactive portrait. The others are two auto-playing films of the same scene, built to be exported as videos: "promo" (36 seconds) and "explained" (54 seconds, in Chinese). The explained one is the useful one: one big insect, plus diagrams of how a leg is solved from its foot target, the alternating three-leg step and a foot landing on a curved surface. Both have a Play button, a scrub bar and an in-browser "export video" button, which we did not try. Both are in our copy. The post's video is also 54 seconds long.
Same author as Melon Club. The GitHub account threerocks, which hosts this page, also hosts Melon Club in this catalogue. Git commits in both repositories are signed with the name LeiLiu, and the author's X profile links to his threerocks GitHub Pages sites, so we treat them as the same person's work, though we have not confirmed his identity with him.
Source and credit. The post links a source repository, github.com/threerocks/web-3d, but it returns "not found" today, so it is private or removed. The public repository, web-3d-pages (created 6 September 2026), holds only the compiled site, with no licence and no readable source, so we do not call it open source. The post credits the MIT-licensed threejs-easybugs by bandinopla as its inspiration; the page's About text says none of that library's code or models was used, and that the insect model, paths, gait and two-segment leg solver were written independently. The post adds that a better approach is being tried.
How we found it. Every entry in this catalogue was found through Tripo's GPT-6 Astra prompt collection, and this one is listed there as "Surface-climbing Insect". The credit is XiaoLei Liu's, and the page is his own.
How it was made and where it lives
Published on GitHub Pages from a public repository. The author publishes as threerocks. Original: https://threerocks.github.io/web-3d-pages/. The Play button above runs our own unmodified copy, so the game keeps working here if that page goes down — which on free hosting usually has nothing to do with the author. Nothing about the game itself is changed, and the original stays linked from every page.
The post that led us here
XiaoLei Liu@leo_xiaoleiStraight out of gpt-6 Astra! The insects look and walk so realistically. Many-legged bugs that cling to and walk across surfaces! Very lifelike, good as decorative props in a game, or for simulating creatures walking on surfaces at different heights.
If you like Small Company, try these
For more from the same author, try Melon Club, a soft-body fruit-merging game. For another interactive piece where thousands of small points react to your pointer, see Orbital Garden.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this a game?
- No. There is no score, goal or ending. You can only watch the insects, change their number, speed and behaviour, and scatter them with a click.
- Is there a single insect crawling over different surfaces?
- Not exactly. There is one surface, a photo of a person made into a shallow relief, and one kind of insect, of which you can have 1 to 64. The leg movement is the part that matches the description.
- Do I need to read Chinese?
- It helps, but the controls are simple: a slider for insect count, a slider for speed, three mode buttons and a pause button. The labels are translated under How to play.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Yes in an emulated phone: it fits the width, and drag and tap work. Follow and avoid modes only respond while a finger is down, and there is no pinch-zoom.
- Is it open source?
- No. The post links a source repository that is no longer reachable, and the public repository holds only the built site with no licence.
- Who is in the photo?
- The page does not say. We do not know who she is or where the picture came from.
- Does it work offline?
- Our copy does; it includes Three.js and the photo. The original has no server features either.
- Is Small Company free to play?
- Yes. Everything on Floating Arcade is free, with no account, ads or downloads.
- Can I embed this game on my own website?
- Yes — copy the snippet below. The embedded player links back here, which is how we ask to be credited.
Embed Small Company on your site
Paste this where you want the game to appear:
