◂ Quasi Interactive
Personnel file // open to work
Nicolas Balkhausen
Developer and founder. I design, build and ship complete products end to end: cloud backends in .NET and Azure, web apps, and C++ game tech.
Based Gold Coast, Australia
Next Relocating to Japan
Citizen New Zealand & Germany
Languages English, German, learning Japanese
Open to Remote, full-time or contract
In short
I founded Quasi Interactive (games) and its software label Elyra Software in 2025. Everything below is real, public and mine: designed, built, debugged, released and supported by one person.
My strongest work is backend. Mitsuke is an event-driven .NET 10 system on Azure, with Infrastructure as Code, OIDC deploys, observability and a written incident report, and it runs for under a cent a month. On the games side, I added online four-player co-op to the Penumbra series by working inside a 2006 C++ engine.
Selected work
Newest and most technical first. Each one links to something you can open, run or read.
Mitsuke 見つけ
Working · pre-launch
A 24/7 watchlist for Japanese car auctions. You save the car you want, and Mitsuke alerts you within minutes when a matching lot appears, with the landed cost in A$/NZ$, whether you can legally import it, and a deal score.
- Event-driven pipeline: an Azure Functions timer fans out over Storage Queues (collect → alert), with retries and poison queues.
- At-least-once queues, exactly-once alerts: each alert channel is claimed in Postgres with
INSERT … ON CONFLICT before anything is sent, so redeliveries and crashes never double-notify.
- Resilience on every outbound call (Polly): timeouts, jittered retry that honours
Retry-After, a circuit breaker and a rate limiter. A real provider outage on 7 Oct 2026 recovered on its own with no lost or duplicated alerts, and it's written up as an incident report.
- Parity tests: 160 landed-cost and 450 import-eligibility golden cases shared with Kensa-ya. The build fails if the two products would ever disagree.
- Ops done properly: infrastructure in Bicep, GitHub Actions deploying through OIDC (no stored credentials), Key Vault plus managed identity, OpenTelemetry to App Insights, and a workbook that answers "why didn't I get an alert?"
C# / .NET 10Azure FunctionsStorage QueuesASP.NET CorePostgreSQLBicepGitHub ActionsOpenTelemetryPollyxUnit + TestcontainersNext.js 16
Kensa-ya 検査屋
Built · launching soon
Upload a Japanese auction sheet and get it in plain English in about a minute: every damage code on a car map, the inspector's handwritten notes translated, the real landed cost, and whether the car can legally be imported to Australia, New Zealand or the US.
- The cost engine itemises price, shipping, duty, GST, luxury car tax and compliance, cites the source for every rate, and uses live exchange rates.
- Import rules are encoded per country, including Australia's 25-year rule and the SEVS register, and give a clear yes, no or maybe with the reason.
- Pay-per-report pricing with automatic refunds when a sheet can't be read, plus a free calculator and SEO guides.
Penumbra: Overture — Online Co-op
Released · v0.11
Four-player online co-op added to a 2006 single-player horror game, built directly into Frictional Games' open-source HPL1 engine.
- Host-authoritative physics sync at 30 Hz for crates, doors and drawers. Players can grab things out of each other's hands.
- Shared enemy AI that hunts whoever is closest, plus replication of script variables, triggers and puzzles, and level transitions for the whole party.
- Server browser, password-protected games, proximity voice chat, co-op respawn, and a version-gated handshake hardened against jitter and out-of-order packets.
C++HPL1 engineUDP networkingOpenALCMake
Penumbra: Black Plague + Requiem — Co-op
Released · v1.0
The same four-player co-op for the sequels, running on the original, unmodified game executables. Nothing in the player's game folder is changed.
- Shared inventory, doors, switches and scripted events; enemies hunt the closest player; late joining; positional voice chat.
blank.
Released · Sept 2026 · free
A 25-minute first-person narrative game about one house and the years that pass through it. It is the first title on EchoEngine, Quasi Interactive's own C++ engine.
- The engine was written from scratch for physics-first games: real-time dynamic lighting, a full rigid-body simulation, Lua scripting, and levels authored in TrenchBroom.
C++17OpenGL 3.3Newton Dynamics 4SDL2OpenALLua
Applyr
Early access · v0.1.4
A Windows desktop job-application assistant. It finds roles, screens each ad for real dealbreakers, drafts an honest application, and fills the form, but it always stops at the submit button so a person makes the final call.
How I work
I build with AI pair-programmers, and I'm open about it. I own the architecture, the trade-offs, the debugging and the shipping, and I'm happy to walk you through any decision in the projects above. My edge is turning an idea into a finished, documented and supported product quickly.
The practical bits
Roles I'm after
- Backend / .NET engineering: Azure, Postgres, APIs, pipelines
- Product engineering at a small remote team
- Technical support / customer success at a software company
- Game development: networking, tools, gameplay
- Contract work through Quasi Interactive is also welcome
Time zone & availability
- Now: AEST (UTC+10)
- Soon: JST (UTC+9), one hour off
- Covers APAC business hours, with a useful overlap with US Pacific afternoons
- Comfortable working async, writing things down and owning outcomes
Background
- 2025–now: Founder, Quasi Interactive & Elyra Software
- 2026: Automotive parts retail, Repco (Motueka, NZ): customer-facing, technical product knowledge
- 19 years in New Zealand, born in Cologne, Germany