‘Safeguard the Deepmines from Corpus defilement. Protect this thriving subterranean ecosystem by completing Bounties given to you by an enigmatic, mushroom-infested Solaris known as Nightcap.’

In October 2025, we had the pleasure of once again partnering with Digital Extremes to create a series of content for Warframe’s ‘The Vallis Undermind’ update. We supported with the development of:

🍄 The Teacher Mod Quest, a cinematic narrative quest weaving in a fresh tutorial to help new players understand Warframe’s equipment modding system, while delivering story elements returning players can still appreciate

🍄Day of the Dead themed skins for the Saturn Six Armour and Shedu weapon

🍄 And the Lavos Khymia Collection; alchemically-tuned Deluxe cosmetics for the 45th Warframe, Lavos

Most notably, The Vallis Undermind update saw the introduction of the 62nd Warframe, Nokko, a childlike trickster that spreads decay, regeneration, and mischief.

We asked our artists for an insight into the creation of Nokko, as well as the Sprodling Ephemera, available with the Nokko Bundle.

THE ORIGINS OF NOKKO

‘Spring into action with Nokko! With his strong roots and an array of tricky fungi this young defender will quickly grow on you’

Led by Stephen Gibson, one of our Art Directors here at Sumo, the team’s job was to not only create a character that naturally felt part of the Warframe universe, but to bring something new and exciting to players.

Matias Tapia, Senior Concept Artist worked to adapt the character design of Nokko from the initial pencil sketch provided by Digital Extremes.

💡The team used the themes of ‘playful’ and ‘childish’ exaggerated the ribcage and shoulders of Nokko’s model to fit those prompts.

Throughout the character design process of Nokko, the concept team took to the books to refresh their knowledge of fungi, with King Trumpet and Oyster mushrooms being the main inspirations for Nokko’s design. Matias gives us a further insight into this, “It was not entirely an unfamiliar subject. Mushrooms are interesting! But in this case building any kind of reference library was about trying to adhere to the way Warframe’s are built in terms of material separation. So, it all had to be mushrooms, but also, they all had to be different enough from each other.”

“King Trumpet and Oyster. These defined the materials the best… At least initially. The rest I could not say, but I tried a few random mushrooms here and there for some details.”

💡Mushroom fun fact! During research, Matias learnt that Lichen is not a mushroom but a hybrid that evolved laterally between fungi and algae. It takes properties from both, making it essentially a fungus that can photosynthesize.

“After creating the Citrine Aphrodita Deluxe Skin Bundle for Warframe’s Isleweaver update, we learned that it was best to identify and define materials early on. So, we concentrated on creating a comprehensive material sheet that gave each material their own language matching to visual references that would reflect Nokko’s natural mushroom-y nature.

We had an idea to split the primary with a tint-able mask to make room for a metallic accent. This changed later, but we kept the spirit of the idea to improve the way material groups interact with each other.”

“We had a very good idea where this was heading so the final touch for the concept was to finalize the orthographic. I quickly used ZBrush to sketch some of the bits to make sure everything would line up in 3D.”

 

HAVE MUSHROOM FOR MORE?

After the design for Nokko was nailed down, it was onto creating the cosmetics, including his Alt Helmet and Syandana (cosmetic garments worn on the back of a Warframe).

“The first step was to match the style and shape language of the original design while providing a unique look.

The first batch (stage 1) was not different enough from the original, so Mat Tremblay Director, Art at Digital Extremes, suggested we use unusual looking mushrooms for reference. We tried this out and while we managed to make something different (stage 2).”

However, the team felt that there was still something missing and the concept was becoming too abstract, so Stephen Gibson, spoke with the team and collectively they decided to find a more relatable reference point for players.

“He prepared a reference set showing different kinds of real headwear that went back into the ‘playful boy’ theme.

In the end we landed on a trapper hat with a pompom, it was a great way to complete the objectives for the design. It looked unique from the original hat in shape; it used unusual fungi as reference and had a good relatable theme.”

Once the team had nailed down the hat, creating the Syandana was much easier!

“All of us had a good idea where to take the theme, what shapes to use and how to use the materials. The idea of a fun kid backpack was obvious, and we got it in one shot (minus the shovel, which we added later from one of the options) then we only had to focus on making it look cool.”

MINUSCULE MUSHROOMS

Accompanying Nokko, and available with the Nokko Bundle, are the Sprodling Ephemera. Leonid Dudakov, Senior Technical Artist here at Sumo, gives an insight into their development:

‘Protect the Sprodlings from the greedy clutches of the Corpus and be greatly rewarded’

“When I saw the concept and got the first 3D mesh, I immediately got excited to make them stumble around in a cute and playful way. I feel they are in some way my babies (even though I’m not Nokko, and I’m also not the only one who parented them for that matter).”

“My aim was mainly to have fun and have a good brain challenge. But also, I’ve got a good friend who plays Warframe quite a lot, so I wanted to add something cool to the game that would enrich his experience.”

Inspiration for the Sprodling Ephemera came from many different directions including the Kodama from Princess Mononoke

Leonid’s core approach to his animation of the Sprodlings was adapted from a 2017 GDC talk by David Rosen, called Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation. From this, Leonid learnt that it’s easier to procedurally animate a non-humanoid and cartoony character than a humanoid one, as you can have a lot more fun with squash, stretch, and inertia without it looking uncanny.

“I’m quite proud of the fact that the same procedural animation setup I did for the ephemera, could then be used without any modifications for the Nokko baby NPCs and the playable Nokko babies. It was possible because I made the animation script as a modular piece that was fully self-contained. It calculated its own velocity and acceleration based on the change in position. This meant it could be attached to anything that moves be it player or NPC or anything else.”

However, we know the question on everyone’s lips… why are the Sprodlings so ‘caked up’?! 🍑

“While making the prototype there was one very important detail missing. Stephen told me it needed a ‘butt’. ‘A butt???!!!’ I asked in befuddlement, and then he simply directed me to Jake from Adventure Time for reference. It… made sense in a weird way.”

We’re honestly just as surprised and delighted as you are that the butt was approved (thank you Digital Extremes 🙌)

💡Before officially becoming known as a Sprodling, they were known internally as ‘Nokko Babies’ and they even became a meme…

It seems that the meme origins of the Sprodlings have been carried on by players as well!

Silliness aside, once this design direction was approved of, “Then it was only a matter of finishing it in concept after DE gave us a very enthusiastic green light.”

“More changes came later from Ryan Ashfield (Senior Character Artist) working closely with Stephen to keep it consistent with Nokko. This consistency was incredibly important, since it later gave birth to the idea of making this ephemera into a main feature for the Warframe, his powers and his quest.”

Sprodling Highpoly Model by Ryan Ashfield, Senior Character Artist

“Huge thanks to the Sumo team for this glorious collaboration! Especially to Stephen Gibson for directing the efforts, for being the idea person, and for letting us just have fun and make crazy things without putting any specific targets.

Sometimes all you need is time and space for a bunch of quick experiments, some of them will fail, but some of them will eventually grow into cool things like the Sprodlings!” – Leonid Dudakov, Senior Technical Artist

MODELLING MYCELIUM

We also spoke with Ryan Ashfield, Senior Character Artist, in depth around his role in sculpting both Nokko and the Sprodling in 3D and implementing them into engine.

“My work consisted of taking Nokko’s assets from the concept stage, all the way through to engine implementation, including sculpts, lows, textures, materials. My goal was to develop up on the concepts and bring a nice consistency between the assets into a full final piece.”

Speaking to Ryan about his inspirations, at that start of working on the assets “I was already in the midst of replaying through The Last of Us 2 with the remastered PC release and was heavily admiring all the art and fungal treatment throughout the game. So that for sure was my main inspiration; seeing the fungal growth across the characters and environments.”

Nokko’s alt high-poly model created by Ryan Ashfield, Senior Character Artist

However, Ryan had to make key considerations while creating a character for Warframe “the main thing to keep in mind is treating each colour as a different material. And so that is the first thing to approach in how to not only style through sculpting, but through the textures and materials. That material layering is a defining part of creating Warframes to keep readability in the details.

Since the majority of the character is also fungal, extra consideration was needed to help define each surface from one another, whether through roughness or in how the fungus was growing and layering over each other.”

Ryan used ZBrush for sculpting, Maya for low-poly and UVs, and Substance Painter for texturing. As he previously mentioned, a key part of his workflow was defining the colours as different materials. This meant that vertex painting was done earlier on in the process to clearly show these areas, “which is later used in Painter for IDs and material layering for the textures.”

“Testing in-game is done ASAP in the block-out phase as to make sure the character is feeling right proportionally and to check any oddities to the design sit right from a player’s perspective. After this point it’s a grind of developing it further till it looks as good as possible for the final result.”

Model Turnaround Sheet created by Ryan Ashfield, Senior Character Artist

“Most of Nokko’s design evolved through simplification of details found in the concept such as on the yellow chicken of the woods-like material, and bringing in more focus on readability and shapes. This was done through bringing in some plumpy forms to the character, subtleties in surfaces to help the light define areas and overall, a little more aesthetic flow.

Most of these changes came from the result of iterating till I felt pleased, and feedback between Digital Extremes.”

Throughout Ryan’s work, he aimed to “help bring a cool looking character to the game that players would hopefully work towards earning and enjoy playing with. After all, that’s what got me into wanting to create characters.”

Since the release of The Vallis Undermind update, we’ve been delighted to see players not only enjoying the character design of Nokko but also the brilliant gameplay that Digital Extremes incorporated into his design!

Take a look at Nokko, the 62nd Warframe and the Sprodling in their full glory in game in the video below!

“As a Warframe fan that’s been playing since beta, it’s been an absolute career highlight to work alongside the incredible people at Digital Extremes on The Vallis Undermind update, and others.

They gave us space to explore, experiment, and pitch ideas to push the quality and creativity of the update. They mentored and worked alongside us, helping us navigate the ins and outs of the IP as well as the Evolution engine. We really shared a truly collaborative experience that shows in the final result.” – Stephen Gibson, Art Director

Huge thank you to the wonderful folks at Digital Extremes for trusting us to add to the world of Warframe, as always we had an absolute blast!

Ready to create your next game with Sumo? Get in touch to talk through your project and how we can support it.