Merlin is a tiny Wizard living on his own little island far away from Reality. But his island is secretly a machine the soul purpose of which is to make music to keep Merlin happy!

Can be played with keyboard or controller. Controls in Instructions menu.

When you pick up an instrument and go into music mode, the controls are in general:

WASD on left hand, or the D-pad. Arrow keys or face buttons on the other hand. The bottom button is the root note, then the left-side button and right-side button play the next two notes. Then W or Up or Y on the controller (the uppermost buttons) plays the highest note. Q and E or the triggers change octave, and Z and C or the bumpers change tempo.

No goals. Just enjoy creating music and watching the environment react. All hand-drawn and animated.

The game is open source on GitHub at https://github.com/wwsimonkalimanus/MerlinsMusickalMachine. I made it for the Gamedev.js Jam 2026, which allows the use of AI, so since I did a bunch of hard artistic work, I splurged on making a game my technical understanding of both music and programming would otherwise make difficult. I'm releasing it open source both to qualify for one of the challenges of the competition and to help other people access the understanding of things like quantization of sound and animation and synthesizing sound data programmatically.

It's also over at Wavedash, and there are almost 40 achievements (!) you can get... but you can still get them outside Wavedash, don't worry! F10 shares screenshots, and F11 shares a snapshot of your island as-is so others can visit it and hear the masterpieces you've created! The only real difference between the itch version and the Wavedash version is that the Wavedash version might eventually get DLC!

https://wavedash.com/games/merlin-s-musickal-machine

Enjoy making music with Merlin the Magician and his Magickal and Mysterious Machine!!!