And there are cases where ideas just happen at the same time.
A few years ago, I wrote a puzzle game called Coco Loco. It was an angry birds style "throw the thing at the other thing and collect the things" but with actual puzzles and items you could deform the levels with to solve the puzzles more easily.
I had a free demo out of the first 10 levels, it got good feedback from testers, and I was ready to roll out a version with 50 levels.
Then, another angry birds style "throw the thing at the other thing and collect the things" but with actual puzzles and items you could deform the levels with, called Coco Loco (trademark), got released.
My initial reaction was that they'd taken my name, my level ideas, and put a larger team on it to get the game out.
Of course, they hadn't.
Turns out, we had both come up with very similar ideas, and the exact same name, at the same time.
These things happen. Thankfully, all the puzzle design work I did could be applied to my current project, Spheretic. (http://notnowlewis.com/spheretic/ if anyone's interested!)
Ejecta is awesome. I remember helping out in the early days of it, fixing up some alpha and rotation bugs... it's a shame how badly intel's "accelerated" canvas performs on android. On the nexus 4, native canvas looks better and performs roughly the same.
