Please note this is a follow up about the game, with a response from the developers.
"Gaming Everything brought light to this, and posted up articles which were then spread throughout the internet.
We actually asked AnDev why they used Yoshi, we got this reply:"
If you're familiar with any sort of business where you might need to buy stock materials, there are sites that host hundreds of thousands of assets for various needs-- images, movie clips, sound, etc. This guy went to a rather popular bank of 3D assets and purchased a set of renders that happened to be Yoshi, claiming he didn't know it was a famous character.
This isn't as shady as it sounds-- huge developers often use stock assets from things like Unreal Engine 3 and so on, as well as most user made mods in games.
The likelihood of him not recognizing Yoshi? It's entirely possible, sure, but if he's developing video games solely on his own, he's got to have some affinity for the medium and I can't fathom how one of the industry's most recognizable faces was lost on him.