I am really loving the stream (on YouTube since I started late) and it is everything I ever wanted to know. I have wanted to know forever how to actually write games at a low level in Windows and how to output sound directly to the sound card going back to the days of DOS.
That's why I'm kind of sorry to post something negative to start off with. I am currently up to day 009, and the audio clipping of the recording has been driving me crazy every day. So I temporarily checked day 020 just to make sure it was still occurring before I mentioned anything about it.
Casey, your recording input level seems to be too high. (You can see it in the little moving bars of your recording program, when it reaches the maximum volume and and little line gets pegged all the way to the right.) When it hits the maximum volume on the input, the audio becomes clipped, and it makes a scratchy sound. It only occurs when you emphasize certain words louder than others.
Would it be possible to lower the input level of your mic, so that that doesn't happen? I figured I'd mention it now, and maybe it would be solved by the time I get to day 021 or something...
One last off topic thing. In day 009 you were talking about the game jam, and I got chills because the one time I got to go to the Game Developer's Conference in 2002, I went to a session with someone presenting who had talked about the exact same game jam (Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab, I believe). He showed one of the games which was just a swarm of Doom monsters surrounding the player as the camera slowly zoomed out. :)
I'll keep watching and learning no matter what, I just hoped that my suggestion would improve the audio, mostly for my own benefit. :)