Best software for visually diagramming a series of martial art strategies?

Software
1

I’m in a martial art, and I’m looking for software that would help me diagram my strategies in different sparring situations. I want this to be a visual diagram.

It should allow me to show, say:

I) if I’m in stance X and my opponent is stance Y

A) I can do this

a) he can react with A

  1. to which I can do blah

  2. or something else

b) or he can react with B

  1. to which I can do something

  2. or something else

B) or I can do this

C) or I can do this

II) whereas if I’m in stance Y and he’s also in Y

III) or if I’m in stance Y and he’s in X

etc.

But I want to be able to have “situations” which can be referred to in multiple places in the diagram… (e.g. he has my sleeve and lapel, and I have his), since many situations would be reachable via multiple roads. Those shouldn’t need to be duplicated.

And it would also be useful to have searchable attributes automatically added: e.g. show all decision nodes that are “children” of a certain grip position… even if those children are in radically different branches of the map.

And finally it would be great if I could also in this visual scheme easily link to other relevant info (e.g. drop in a video clip of a technique).

I want to be able to start creating the drawing from anywhere (in other words, start inputting a random situation in) and then insert it into the flow anywhere I like, or into multiple places.

Does this all make sense? Any ideas about the best software for this sort of thing? Flowchart? Mindmap? Infinite whiteboard? Something else? Any particular recs?

2

I know nothing about it but maybe some of the software for choreographers.

3

I’m thinking contextual tagging. Every stance offers techniques, every technique has multiple theoretical counters, and everything has “what came before”. Consider a sequence:

Image Name: Natural Posture
Tag: Stance:SanchinStance, Stance:CatStance, Stance:FrontStance, etc.

Image Name: Cat Stance
Tag: Parent:NaturalPosture, Technique:LowKick, Technique:StepPunch, Technique:HighBlock, etc.

Image Name: Low Kick
Tag: Parent:CatStance, Parent:SanchinStance, Counter:FrontStanceDownBlock, Counter:SideStep, etc.

Image Name: Front stance Down Block
Tag: Parent:LowKick, etc.

Do this Zettelkasten style (linked notes), and opening “Down Block” would show all of the parents of “Down Block”. Somebody could go back “up” to “low kick”, and discover that “sidestep” is another valid counter, etc.

You’d have to think through the tagging. I know I didn’t do a perfect job above, but worth looking at. :slight_smile:

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4

This looks like visualizing a decision tree to me, like a chess game. The “situations” you mention complicate things more to become like a graph as you could reach the same decision from different stance/reactions. (connections could be done backwards to estrategies that have been evaluated in the past, that is not so frequent in chess)

I believe the best solution would be a good graph-based diagramming tool that could allow you to tag nodes and perhaps visualize the graph filtered by tag attribute. Draw.io/Diagrams.net allow you to add custom tags to any shape and then filter the diagram by tag, but I feel like that could become cumbersome pretty easily for a big “library of strategies”.

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