It’s not often you play a video game in front of an audience, but as Mason Beckler defeated the final boss in the new game “Lord of the Bats,” created by the folks at DigiPen in Redmond, the room erupted into applause.

“Well, that was an experience and a half,” Beckler said with a laugh, causing the room to erupt again.

It was the first time Beckler of Renton had played the game he helped design and both he and the game drew rave reviews from those watching.

Beckler, 16, has cystic fibrosis and the Make-A-Wish Foundation and DigiPen teamed up to grant him his wish of designing a game, which is now available to play for free online.

“It is exactly everything I hoped,” Beckler said after playing through the game’s levels. “It’s harder than I thought it was. And I thought it was hard to begin with!”

“Lord of the Bats,” a side-scrolling, cartoonish game about Private Battede, a bat in a necktie tasked with finding a magic fruit to save the bat kingdom from the evil Lord Zlo, started as sketches and ideas in Beckler’s notebooks.

Meanwhile, at DigiPen, a team known as Project Asclepius – named for the Greek god of healing – was being formed by a pair of students hoping to do a little community service with the knowledge they’d gained during their time at DigiPen, a Redmond-based school aimed at video game design.

“It was a great coincidence to find a kid with a wish like this,” said Devin Jensen, team co-leader.

Beckler first brought his idea and notebooks to the Asclepius team in November and the group talked about what he wanted for the game, both in style and substance.

According to Art Producer Joe Erskine, Mason brought “pages upon pages” of art, narrative and concept ideas to the first meeting in October 2014.

“The guy came prepared,” said Erskine.

Even Beckler admits to “overscoping” the game, which had to be “massively toned down.”

“It got sort of pretentious at one point,” he said, adding that at some point it all clicked for him: “He’s a bat.”

Together, Beckler and team whittled down the original idea to three playable levels through a handful of other meetings and the programmers and designers, all of whom were students at DigiPen and worked on “Lord of the Bats” as part of a senior project or on their own time. All of the artists, for example, who transformed Beckler’s original designs into  the characters on the screen, worked for free, for example.

Jensen said Beckler had final approval, but “very rarely” gave a thumbs down. And the team itself loved the idea and the game.

“It’s awesome,” Jensen said. “You’ve got bats and robots… I was ecstatic about this project.”

As he played through the game, Beckler ran a running commentary of what he was seeing and doing, and was thrilled to see his characters come to life  in ways he hadn’t envisioned.

“I don’t think you could have made that any more terrifying,” he said at one point. “Perfect.”

On one level, Beckler even gave the audience a glimpse at the creative process, noting “At one point, he had a buzzsaw instead of a laser.”

According to mom Angie Beckler, Mason is a “video game fanatic” who loves Super Mario Brothers from the first time he played it. Angie said while Mason never really used coloring books, he always drew his own pictures and used his imagination so she was really excited to see him through this process.

“He lit up,” she said, adding that Mason had further come out of his shell playing the game in front of the audience.

“He’s not like that,” she said with a bright smile. “He just blossomed.”

“Lord of the Bats” is available for free play at games.digipen.edu.