My son and I have been building a game without knowing how games are built. How do we start over?

My son and I have been building a baseball game together in Claude Code. He designed what he wants in a PRD, He drives the build while I watch, and we've gotten pretty far just describing what we want and letting the AI write it. It kinda works, he can kinda play it. But we've hit the limit of vibe-coding our way through it.

Here's our problem: we don't actually understand the fundamentals of how a game is put together. So when something's off, we're guessing. We moved one base on the field across many separate sessions because we have no mental model for how this stuff is supposed to be structured.That's just one example of many. We're fighting it instead of building it.

We don't want a quick fix. We want to learn the foundation so we stop flailing.

What we're asking the community:

1. If you've built a game, what core concepts do we have to understand before anything else? We keep hearing "game loop," "state," "sprites," "collision" but we couldn't explain them to you. Explained to a 10 year old.

2. What's the right way to think about structuring a game so it's not one giant file? Ours is basically one 2,800-line file right now.

3. Best beginner resource you'd actually recommend for someone who learns by building, not by reading docs cover to cover? Course, YouTube, anything. Bonus if it's something a kid and a parent can work through together.

4. For someone using AI to write the code, what do we need to understand ourselves vs. what we can let the AI handle?

For context, it's a React app drawing on a web canvas, but we think our gap is conceptual, not language-specific.

We made the repo public and there's a full PRD if anyone wants to see what we're going for:

- Repo: https://github.com/ruben-aguirre/diamond-scholar

- The plan (PRD): https://github.com/ruben-aguirre/diamond-scholar/blob/master/docs/PRD-v2.1.md

Not looking for someone to build it for us. We want to understand it well enough to direct it. My son and I are connecting, but now I'm getting frustrated because I can't help him the way I'd like, and the game isn't looking they way he wants it.

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My son and I have been building a game without knowing how games are built. How do we start over?