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I'm undecided if I want to implement this feature in my game at the time or not. I don't want the project to get to far out of control so I'm focusing on core mechanics first.
Is this a feature that is easy to implement later assuming I data drive everything and store everything?
Are you asking from the perspective of technicalities of implementing or the ramifications of the design? Either way, the answer to your question is "yes".
From the technical side of things, generally speaking you just find the hooks in your code that are responding to your achievement events and put in your stat tracking code there. You might have to add some new things if you're tracking things that aren't exactly discrete events that are already happening in the game (for example: X amount of hours played).
From the design side of things, well, achievements are extrinsic motivators and adding them doesn't really play too much into the core gameplay loop, except for people who want to seek them out. So they're pretty safe regardless.
shotsFired++ into the part where new bullets are instantiated, and shotsHit++ in the part where a bullet impacts another player. It helped that I tracked who shot what bullet (because I use the information to track who got what kill etc)
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– bobobobo
Oct 27 '13 at 19:12
Provided that your game engine is designed well and uses some kind of observable event system (where events are generated and listened for by interested parties), it should be quite easy to "plug-in" an achievement system at a later point (by adding appropriate listeners). This kind of design is very flexible.
As already the existing people have added good answers, let me answer uncovered situations.
If at all you are in a position where you have completed coding your game and now starting to code achievements and find it very complex to maintain too many variables and counts and clearing them off at certain events and things like that.
You can always create one class (preferably singleton) to receive all events. Now list all your achievements. Then list all game events needed to be tracked. For e.g. my current list looks like this
KILL ENEMY - walking, bullets PLAYER DEATH - falling_off, health ENTER_ROOM, EXIT_ROOM etc.
Those extra details like walking, bullets can be parameters. Now have one function called fireEvent in that Achievement tracking class. Search all places in code where you need to fireEvents and call that function. Now do the rest of dirty work in the Achievements class. this is the safest way to not disturb existing code and code Achievements. It worked out pretty fast for me.
